Banks are seeing some good early signs in repayments with a significant number of borrowers committing to restart normal payment cycles; many forbearance periods will start coming to an end later this month and these early signs are proving that borrowers were not hit as hard as expected; “We would expect a meaningful portion of that forbearance hopefully not to be needed any more,” said Brendan Coughlin, Head of Consumer Lending at former RBS subsidiary Citizens Bank, to the FT; the bank is willing to be pretty liberal in allowing borrowers to continue on forbearance in order to save for a safety net; Synchrony and American Express have also seen credit card borrowers return back to normal payment schedules; Amex is likely to stop the forbearance program due to low demand from borrowers; “The most interesting thing to me has been that many people that asked for and received forbearance have continued to make their scheduled payments,” said Jason Goldberg, Analyst at Barclays, to the FT. The Financial Times
