News
Neighborhood Bancorp in San Diego, holding company of Neighborhood National Bank, has an agreement in place to raise $6 million from Chicago's Taylor Asset Management in Chicago. The deal will effectively double the bank's capital, raising the bank's Tier 1 capital ratio to more than 18% and its total risk-based capital to more than 38%. "This agreement represents an important step in recapitalizing and positioning the bank for future growth," said Dan Yates, the bank's president and chief executive. Taylor Asset Management has been involved in the turn arounds of several California banks, including Tri-Valley Bank in San Ramon, Coast National Bank in San Luis Obispo, Pan Pacific Bank in Fremont and Sierra Vista Bank in Folsom.
Can a bank be beneficial to all and harmful to none?
Does your bank do only good and no harm? Do you know? Beneficial State Bank aims to bank in a way that is beneficial to all and harmful to none. It’s more than a platitude. They proactively measure themselves against goals such as how many affordable housing units they have financed, how many kilowatt hours of clean energy their loans have produced and how many millions of dollars they have loaned non-profits.
Kat Taylor and her husband set out to create a business that would do social good with a sustainable business model. So far, they seem to be doing quite well.
Cachet Financial Solutions, Inc. and Central Bank of Kansas City have rolled out an end-to-end reloadable prepaid card program for banks, credit unions and alternative financial services providers. Powered by Central Bank of Kansas City's program managmenet and Cachet's award-winning Select Mobile Money technology, the new card program provides a more convenient way for financial institutions and marketing organizations to offer general purpose reloadable prepaid cards. It also makes card usage more engaging and convenient for customers. The companion mobile app can be customized with corporate branding, a range of optional features and a suite of tools that can help card distributors manage their card programs and engage card users.
Black and Latino interns and professionals from across Chicago’s financial industry attended the third annual Summer Intern Career Conference at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago organized by the Financial Services Pipeline Initiative. The initiative was co-founded by Urban Partnership Bank to increase the representation of Latinos and African Americans at all levels of Chicago’s financial industry. African-Americans and Latinos make up 38% of the Chicago area population but are only employed in 22% of jobs in Chicago’s financial services industry. Only 5% of executives and senior-level managers are African-American or Latino. The initiative now includes eighteen Chicago-area financial institutions.
Southern Bancorp’s 2015 annual report describes the institution's growing impact. In 2015, Southern provided 2,726 individuals and families with financing for affordable housing and homeownership. It also supported 4,419 jobs through commercial, small business and microloans – over 75% of which were made in low to moderate income census tracts. Roger Perry was one entrepreneur who thrived with help from Southern. Roger built his auto detail business one car and one client at a time. It was that tenacity that attracted the attention of Southern Bancorp to provide the financial and technical assistance access needed for him to build a facility in which he and his employees could wash cars year round. Today, RP Detail is a thriving testament to the spirit of entrepreneurship.
Beneficial State Bank has completed its merger with Pan American Bank and is celebrating with a Toyota Prius giveaway. The merger will increase the size of Beneficial State to approximately $650 million in assets, allowing it to better meet the needs of underserved communities in the Central Valley and Los Angeles with financial products and services. “We are embarking on an exciting moment in our journey,” said Dan Skaff, Beneficial State Co-CEO and president. "We are bringing together extraordinary talent and partnering with innovative companies that provide forward-looking technology to deliver beneficial banking products and services to all families throughout California, Oregon and Washington."
Teri Williams, President of OneUnited Bank discussed the financial system's structural racism in a recent interview. “If you look at what has happened in the banking industry or financial services industry over the past 10 years, the black community was faced with predatory lending, we currently have payday lenders that charge rates as high as 400% on a short term loan, they charge fees to cash checks of 1% or more, and the legal framework, the regulatory framework allows this to exist… Black people spend $1.2 trillion annually. That is more than some whole countries spend. But only 2% of that is spent in the black community, so the opportunity for us to use that spending to build wealth in our community is very small.”
In an interview, Virginia Community Capital Community Programs Manager Leah Fremouw spoke about the benefits of the bank's status as a Certified B Corps. "[The B Corps designation] allowed us to elevate our social mission to the same significance as our shareholder value. 50% of our Board help develop social and environmental standards for industry, we give preference to local and sustainable suppliers, and our staff are given opportunities to have paid time off for community service. In late June we held an event in Old Town Petersburg, at Trapezium Brewery (a renovation project we recently funded) – one of several celebrations we’ve held over the past few months with our partners and supporters to commemorate our achievements together. The Tri-Cities region has received a total of 220 loans during the past decade."
Black-owned banks across the country, including Savannah, Georgia-based Carver State Bank, are seeing an increase in applicants after recent protests against police brutality. "We've seen a tremendous increase in the number of inquiries about the bank and the number of accounts that have been opened," said Carver State Bank President Robert James. "In fact, on Monday and Tuesday of last week we probably opened as many accounts as we would probably open in a full month in two days... Most citizens can't take to the streets and demonstrate but they've found that one of the things they can do is to try to not feel so powerless about the spending of their money and the deposit of their money in banks.”
Kat Taylor, Co-CEO of Oakland, Calif.-based Beneficial State Bank, was interviewed for the cover story of Conscious Company Magazine: “[Capital] has been deployed [in harmful ways] because it got anonymized. As soon as the banking system got big enough and the deposits all went into this big black box, then the bankers on the other side felt entitled to lend it to anything that would maximize return... I believe we can take the banking system back and make it govern in the public interest... We wouldn’t want depositors saying, ‘Lend to this company,’ or, ‘Lend to that nonprofit,’ but they should be able to look at our quarterly and annual track records and say, ‘Yep, I’m comfortable with that lending practice, so I’m staying here,’ or, ‘Nope! I don’t want any part of that, so I’m getting out.’”