U.S. households without bank accounts grew by 821,000 from 2009 to 2011, pushing the so-called unbanked population to 8.2 percent of the nation’s total, according to the FDIC's National Survey of Unbanked and Underbanked Households, Bloomberg News reported today. The result is that about 17 million adults manage their finances without checking or savings accounts at insured institutions, many of them relying instead on non-banks such as payday lenders and check-cashing stores. "Insured financial institutions have an important chance to grow their customer base by expanding opportunities that bring unbanked and underbanked individuals into mainstream banking," said Martin J. Gruenberg, the FDIC’s acting chairman. The agency released the report in conjunction with a conference to explore ways banks could profit by serving this population. The study, conducted in 2011, revealed that 1 in 12 U.S. households, are unbanked. That is up 0.6 percentage points from the first study, conducted in 2009.
