This opinion piece focuses on the potential threats to CDFI Fund appropriations with proposed domestic discretionary spending cuts on the table in the 115th Congress and advocates for strong and coordinated action from the CDFI Industry as a whole to ensure the continuity of the funding stream.

CDBA Members are consistently on the cutting edge of new opportunities to maximize and publish the social impact that they are having in local communities across the country. Therefore it is fitting that City First Bank & Southern Bancorp are two of the first institutional members to join Mighty, a new platform that will help "small but powerful" banks to connect with potential depositors or investors, especially among the Millennial demographic, who are seeking a bank that makes a positive social impact.

One of the most important concepts to come out of the Promontory Network is the idea of reciprocal deposits, which allows the network to chop up a large deposits and distribute the funds among many small banks, stay within the government maximum and keeping the entire deposit on the books of the original bank. The FDIC's new 2016 rule that allows this category of deposits to now be considered under the definition of "core deposits" has lowered the cost of insuring these deposits for many small community banking institutions.

The US House of Representatives has recently passed an amendment to the Dodd-Frank legislation, which scraps the US$50bn asset threshold above which banks were previously considered “too big to fail” and therefore subjected to more stringent regulation. In its place, the bill proposes determining the systemic risk of each bank based on its size, interconnectedness, financial infrastructure, global cross-jurisdictional activity and complexity – a model based on the Basel Committee’s approach. The law still has to go through Senate before being presented to the president.