Ward Scull: Honoring a Legendary Advocate for Fair Lending

by Jay Speer, VPLC Executive Director

I have been thinking a lot about Ward Scull who died recently.  Ward was a long-time ally of VPLC in our multi-year legislative fight with Virginia’s payday lenders.  VPLC advocated for just and fair lending, but the payday lenders wanted to continue making huge sums of money exploiting Virginians desperate for cash to pay their bills.

After years of legislative efforts to foster a safe and viable market for small loans, Virginia lawmakers in 2020 passed bipartisan legislation—the Fairness in Lending Act.  This prohibited loans with exorbitant final payments, known as balloon payments, and brought down prices for consumers. A Pew Charitable Trust analysis of the act confirmed that under the legislation, lenders can profitably offer affordable installment loans with structural safeguards, saving the typical borrower hundreds of dollars in fees and interest with estimated total consumer savings exceeding $100 million annually.

But back to Ward Scull.

I was looking for a one-word description for Ward and came up with irascible (having or showing a tendency to be easily angered).

After all, Ward’s many years of hard work to push the predatory lenders out of Virginia started when he got angry.  He tried to help an employee by paying off his car title loan, but the lender refused his check. Looking into the documents of her $1,700 of payday loans, the Wharton School of Business graduate was outraged at what he saw as a business model of exploitation.  That led to Ward donating his time and money over the course of many years to rein in predatory lending in Virginia.  But it wasn’t just anger that motivated Ward.  For Scull, this was an exercise in faith. He was deeply but quietly religious.

Thankfully, Ward lived to see the Fairness in Lending Act pass, and the payday lenders leave Virginia.  He would be distressed, though, to know that lenders continue to try and evade the Fairness in Lending Act.  So-called earned-wage access, or workplace payday lenders, that allow employees to collect their salaries in advance. These companies — you may have seen their commercials on television — can require fees and balloon payments, akin to those banned by the 2020 law. These payments can ultimately ensnare borrowers in debt traps, compelling them to take out successive loans.  Other lenders try and team up with out-of-state banks to evade the law.

“He was in Richmond every single year until we were able to get the job done,” Senator Mamie Locke said. “He would be disappointed to know that there are companies still trying backdoor maneuvering to undermine the law, but my message to him is: ‘Ward, we’re on it!’”