Recent News
The CARES Act created the extremely successful Paycheck Protection Program which has helped small businesses maintain payroll during these challenging times. The U.S. Department of Treasury (Treasury), the Small Business Administration (SBA) and over 5,000 lenders took quick action to launch this program and have provided an unprecedented 4.8 million loans. The deadline to apply for the PPP is June 30, 2020, but an additional $140 billion of PPP funds remain unobligated. To ready our small business, lenders and entrepreneurs for learning how to “live with the virus” and move towards... Read more
Forbes partnered with market research firm Statista to produce their second annual look at the Best Banks In Each State to gauge whose customers gave their banks the highest grades. Nearly 25,000 customers in the U.S. were surveyed for their opinions on their current and former banking relationships. Southern Bancorp and BankPlus were named among the best banks in their states.
An effort encouraging investors to buy stock in Black-run banks could create new challenges for the leaders of those companies. The Buying Black movement, which took root last week, led to sharp increases in the shares of companies such as Broadway Financial in Los Angeles, Carver Bancorp in New York and M&F Bancorp in Durham, N.C. An influx of new investors could increase pressure to improve shareholder returns, while any strategic effort designed to generate higher profits could also draw a backlash. At the same time, markets are fickle — most shares in Black-run banks have fallen... Read more
Three years after its successful initial investment, The Cameron Foundation has renewed a $1 million loan and deposit with Virginia Community Capital (VCC), a community development financial institution that makes impact investments throughout the Commonwealth. As the community begins to reopen from the COVID-19 closures, the funds will be deployed into the Tri-Cities and other areas in Cameron's footprint, supporting their economic rebuilding.
In partnership with the 17-member Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFI) network and lawmakers, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf recently announced the launching of a $225 million statewide grant program that will go to support small businesses throughout the state that have been impacted by the COVID-19 public health crisis and the subsequent business closure order. CDFI is a group of 17 Pennsylvania-based community development financial institutions that primarily provide financing options for small businesses. The fund will be distributed through the recently enacted... Read more
Podcast: Sells, American Banker's Digital Banker of the Year, explains how he encouraged his team to take risks on projects like a three-minute account opening process and a system that analyzes core data in real time to help set deposit prices. Read American Banker's profile on him here.
Foundations and other institutional investors are targeting capital to help hardest-hit communities recover from the coronavirus pandemic, reviving a structure that helped during the Great Recession: community development financial institutions. Unlike traditional banks, CDFIs deploy federal funds that they then leverage four to six times with private debt from banks, foundations, corporations and individuals to lend to disadvantaged business owners, affordable housing developers and community projects that would not otherwise qualify for traditional loans. There are now more... Read more
Lawmakers are sounding the alarm over complaints from minority-owned and other underserved companies that they are unable access to small-business loans mandated by recent pandemic relief laws. Some independent data backs up their concerns, pointing to minority-owned businesses getting rejected or still waiting for coronavirus rescue funds. And, with the nation intensely focused on racial divisions after the killing of George Floyd, members of Congress from both parties continue to demand better demographic data from the government on recipients of Paycheck Protection Program loans. Fears... Read more
From Rep. Mike Quigley, Chair of the Financial Services and General Government Subcommittee: Last month, the House passed legislation to provide critical funding to help state and local governments, support our front-line workers in the fight against coronavirus and assist small businesses and workers impacted by the pandemic. However, our work is far from over; we will be dealing with the economic fallout for months, if not years to come. That’s why the $1 billion in the HEROES Act for Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs) is key. This funding will not only provide... Read more
The Community Development Bankers Association (CDBA) stands in solidarity with black communities in calling for an end to systemic racism and police violence. In response to the national events of the last two weeks, we say black lives absolutely do matter. There is no excuse for racism of any kind.
When the Small Business Administration rolled out its Paycheck Protection Program, it set off a fire drill of sorts among bank technology executives, who had to quickly figure out how to accept applications from borrowers and load them into the SBA's system before the money ran out. Like other banks, the $1.4 billion-asset Sunrise Banks in St. Paul, Minn., had two weeks to decide whether to buy or build a solution, set it up, test it and take it live. As of June 5, Sunrise had made $216 million in paycheck protection loans. What follows is a look at how and why the bank made the... Read more
When does a country reach a tipping point—a point when the citizenry concludes that things are simply spinning out of control, and that something different is required? The question arises, obviously, as protests and looting spread across America in the wake of the brutal police killing of a black man—shocking scenes that have come atop a once-in-a-century pandemic and a Depression-like economic slide. In a moment of crisis, it’s hard to tell when such events will simply fade away in a return to the status quo, and when they will produce lasting change in political and social... Read more
Each year LEDC selects a lender that has shown stellar performance in participating in the Louisiana Small Business Loan Guaranty Program. The Bank of the year recipient exemplifies one of the tenants of LEDC's mission by "Cultivating jobs and economic opportunity through small business, innovation and entrepreneurship." This year's recipient, Bank of St. Francisville, provided access to more than $1.5 million in capital to native small businesses through the Louisiana's small business loan guaranty program.
Zach Luke of Greenwood's Bank of Commerce has been elected to serve as president of Mississippi Young Bankers, a section of the Mississippi Bankers Association. Mississippi Young Bankers provides leadership development activities and supports financial literacy programs of the MBA and its member banks. Young Bankers members are involved in administering scholarship programs for high school and college students, supporting the MBA Education Foundation and advocating policy positions important to the banking industry. Luke serves as chief financial officer of the Bank of Commerce, where he... Read more
Radical change is possible in the banking sector. It's already happened, actually. Over the past 30 years, the U.S. banking sector went from one dominated by small, community banks to one dominated by massive, global banks. Public policy was a major driver of that shift. Some have spent the last decade or longer searching for ways to restore some community-mindedness to the banking sector. We can’t possibly list them all, but here are some of the ones we’ll be watching closely as the COVID-19 pandemic drags out into an economic recession and eventual recovery. Native American... Read more
Applications officially opened on April 3 for the new Paycheck Protection Program loans guaranteed by the Small Business Administration. The program is intended to help small businesses keep or rehire employees to get through at least part of the economic disruption from COVID-19. All or most of each loan can be forgiven, based on whether borrowers maintain employee levels they had before the economic disruption from the virus took hold. Serving small cities and towns and rural parts of Arkansas and the Mississippi Delta, Southern Bancorp was already approving and wiring Paycheck... Read more
An emergency loan program intended to get money swiftly into the hands of small businesses has all but collapsed under an unprecedented crush of applications and a shortage of funds, overwhelming agency officials and prompting urgent calls for action on Capitol Hill. The Economic Injury Disaster Loan program, or EIDL, a long-standing program run by the Small Business Administration (SBA), is separate from the $349 billion Paycheck Protection Program for small businesses that is the subject of a ... Read more
Community Development Financial Institutions, or CDFIs, are utilizing all resources at their disposal to help small businesses stay afloat as the novel coronavirus spreads throughout the U.S. CDFIs serve customers typically overlooked by mainstream financial institutions. Beneficial State Bank, an FDIC-insured CDFI that provides commercial banking services to underserved communities, had received 500 phone calls a day about PPP two days before the program even launched on April 3, Interim CEO Randell Leach said. CDBA members Bank Plus, Mission... Read more
Applying for PPP loans is urgent; but how do you sift through 10,400 banks and credit unions for ones that are more likely than others to take and process your application? Relying mostly on publicly available data, Mighty's platform profiles all 5,200 banks in the country, highlighting each bank's connections — or the lack thereof — to specific causes, communities and underserved small businesses. Many of those businesses are currently scrambling to find a bank willing to take their application for one of the new Paycheck Protection Program loans. ... Read more
Minority business owners have always struggled to secure bank loans. Now, many banks want to deal only with existing customers when making loans through the government's $349 billion aid package. Anticipating that minority business owners could struggle to tap federal aid, some lawmakers are proposing ways to earmark additional funds specifically for minority-owned businesses. And on Wednesday, a group of prominent black investors, including John W. Rogers Jr., the billionaire co-chief executive of Ariel Investments, a mutual fund manager, sent a letter to lawmakers expressing... Read more