More than one million student loan borrowers go into default in the US each year, according to Credit and Collection News. Outstanding education debt in the US has tripled over the last decade and now exceeds US$1.5 trillion, posing a greater burden to Americans than car loans or credit card debt. By 2023, nearly 40 per cent of borrowers are expected to default on their student loans, despite a range of protections that should make default rare, said Kristin Blagg, a research associate at think tank the Urban Institute in Washington DC. She listed a range of exacerbating factors: additional debt pressures from utility and medical bills, neighbourhood median income. After default, the Urban Institute found, a student loan borrower will see their balance balloon by around ten per cent due to collections fees and the accumulation of interest. From November, banks in the UK will have to publish on their websites and in their branches information about their performance, including operational and security incidents and how many complaints have been lodged against them. Finextra reports that the new financial comparison rules introduced by the Financial Conduct Authority aim to encourage retail customers to "shop around" and are designed to drive up banks' service standards. Royal Bank of Scotland has been ranked the UK's least popular bank by both personal and business customers. And its week is getting worse: the US Department of Justice has released a damning report highlighting the extent of wrongdoing at the bank in the run-up to the financial crisis. The DoJ and RBS confirmed they had reached a final agreement on a US $4.9 billion fine for the bank's behaviour between 2005 and 2008. The report reveals that while the bank was continuing to tout its package of subprime mortgages to investors in 2007, its US chief credit officer was describing the RMBS as containing "total f***ing garbage loans" riddled with rampant fraud "all disguised to, you know, look okay kind of .. in a data file".