Recent News
Reversing an industry trend of decreased rural lending, Southern Bancorp's 2013 annual report shows lending growth to $742 million, including 562 small business loans and microloans. Among customers profiled is Robert Heard, founder of Trumann, Ark.-based cabinet manufacturer Tru-Cab. As a young man, Heard worked at the Singer sewing machine factory by day and in his garage cabinet workshop by night. With Southern's help, Heard left Singer to open a Tru-Cab, a small shop which soon prospered. In the 1980's, the Singer factory closed and the building was vacant for years.... Read more
With help from Virginia Community Capital, Khans Builders & Contractors has converted a historic building in Roanoke, Va. into a 90-apartment mixed income space. VCC provided construction financing, in partnership with HomeTown Bank and Community Bankers’ Bank and with permanent financing from The Virginia Housing Development Authority. This is a dream come true for Faisal Khan. For years, he had driven past the once-vibrant Ponce de Leon hotel and imagined ways to revitalize the building. The Khans paid great attention to detail to restore original architectural... Read more
Virginia Community Capital has successfully raised and self-funded $10 million to capitalize the Virginia Fresh Food Loan Fund, a milestone in VCC's Clinton Global Initiative America commitment to facilitate healthy food enterprises in urban and rural communities throughout Virginia. The fund offers small businesses technical assistance and lending opportunities to encourage the sale of market healthy items and foster the expansion of food hubs in rural communities. VCC has already deployed $600,000 from the fund to projects increasing access to healthy foods. “According... Read more
The CDFI Fund is recruiting reviewers with considerable community economic development finance expertise for the 2014 round of the NMTC Program. Working in teams, but reading each application independently, reviewers will evaluate NMTC applications using the CDFI Fund’s review criteria and rate the application's business strategy and community outcomes sections. The entire process will be web-based. Due to conflict of interest concerns, employees of organizations applying for the 2014 NMTC round and employees of organizations which intend to receive loans or investments from organizations... Read more
Virginia Community Capital, in partnership with Altria Group and the City of Richmond, has created a new loan fund program to identify small businesses who wish to relocate or expand along Richmond's Jefferson Davis Corridor. The corridor was once a thriving commercial area, but declined after the construction of I-95 rerouted traffic from the Jefferson Davis Highway. Today, despite bordering several historic neighborhoods, the corridor is an underserved area which suffers from abandoned structures and a high commercial vacancy rate. Virginia Community Capital hopes its... Read more
Apple has announced that its new generation iPhones and the Apple Watch will incorporate Apple Pay, a new mobile wallet. The product could give Apple a leg up on mobile payments, a field many companies have attempted to expand with limited success. Using a credit card on their device, customers wave their phone or watch in front of a terminal to pay. The payment is delivered to the terminal using near-field communication, or N.F.C. chip. Apple hopes that its promises about security, including that credit card information will not be stored on the smartphones or devices or on Apple’s... Read more
The CDFI Fund has announced it will launch a new Capacity Building Initiative training and technical assistance series later this year titled Expanding CDFI Coverage in Underserved Areas. The series, presented by Opportunity Finance Network, will provide specialized training and technical assistance to CDFIs to extend their reach into underserved communities that lack a CDFI presence. “By expanding the ability of CDFIs to have impact in areas currently lacking adequate financial services and lending opportunities, this training series will directly align with the CDFI Fund’s primary... Read more
Chicago real estate magnate Daniel Goodwin describes his ownership of Pan American Bank as a labor of love, his way of promoting entrepreneurship in disadvantaged neighborhoods. Goodwin sets strategy and handles board matters as chairman of Pan American's holding company. “The most satisfaction I get from banking is working with Pan American Bank in making creative loans to startup businesses, particularly in the inner city,” Goodwin said. Since Goodwin bought the bank in 2007, its size has increased rapidly; after Pan American's recently announced acquisition of Bank of... Read more
Home Depot has confirmed that its payment systems were breached, potentially affecting customers who used a payment card at the stores since April. It is not yet known how many consumers were affected by the breach or to what extent their credit and debit card information has been compromised, but the company says no debit pin numbers have been compromised. Home Depot will provide free identity protection services to any customer who used a card at its stores since April. If a breach did begin in April, it would have overlapped with the retailer’s busy spring shopping season, which... Read more
Regulators have unveiled a second round of CRA reforms, this time increasing banks' opportunities to get CRA credit for small-dollar loan programs. The new reform, instituted by the OCC, FDIC and Federal Reserve Board, represents an incremental change in CRA policy, changing to the agencies' "Question and Answers" document used to interpret CRA enforcement procedures. CRA credit for small-dollar lending is already available as part of the CRA exam's lending test. But under the proposed revision, small-dollar lending could garner additional consideration as one of a number of "innovative or... Read more
Chicago's Urban Partnership Bank held a Customer Appreciation Day to celebrate the Bank's fourth anniversary. Each branch provided refreshments and offered an opportunity to win tickets to a Chicago Sky basketball game. At the South Shore Summer Festival, Urban Partnership volunteers donated their time to share information about the impact of their financial services and products. Volunteers from Urban Partnership Bank also teamed up with the Gary Comer Youth Center for a gardening day, harvesting crops, prepping soil and helping build winter hoop houses.
James Sills, the new president and CEO of Mechanics & Farmers Bank, says that growing security threats will make experience in both financial services and technology more attractive to banks. "The bad guys are extremely sophisticated," Sills said. "They have some unbelievable tools to penetrate networks, databases and point-of-sale machines." In addition to maintaining web security, Sills will oversee implementation of M&F's huge conversion of its core processing system to Fiserv, a new platform that should help M&F expand into new product offerings. Sills... Read more
A Bloomberg investigation has uncovered a secret financing network which connects investors including Harvard University to payday lenders. At the center of the network is Vector Capital IV, a San Francisco private-equity fund run by Alex Slusky. Slusky's fund consisted of $1.2 billion in funds raised from investors including Harvard University, who were told the fund would buy and turn around struggling software companies. But Slusky struggled to find enough companies to buy. When Harvard, fed up with delays, tried to pull out, Slusky invested the funds in Cane Bay Partners, owners of a... Read more
The recent iCloud hack that led to the theft of celebrity photos from Apple's popular cloud storage service has fueled concerns about the safety of the data banks and their employees store in the cloud. Analysts warn that any service which backs up data to an external cloud server introduces a degree of security risk. Apple's iCloud was particularly vulnerable because some Apple service logins lacked brute force protection -- a measure which would have prevented hackers from entering thousands of randomly generated password guesses searching for a correct match. Security experts advise... Read more
Banks are making less of their money from customer-account fees than at any time in the past seven decades as strict government rules and changing consumer behavior squeeze a major source of revenue. After peaking in 2009, the annual account fees collected at U.S. banks have declined, even as the volume of bank deposits has swelled. The fees have dropped nearly 21% to $32.5 billion last year from $41.1 billion in 2009, reversing a trend of fee growth that had lasted since 1942. Fees have become less profitable since 2010, when the Federal Reserve put in place a new regulation requiring... Read more
ICBA is now accepting nominations for the 2014 ICBA Community Banker of the Year award. All community bankers are eligible, from C-suite to teller. Nominees should demonstrate outstanding leadership and results both in their community and within their bank. Self-nominations are permitted. ICBA will accept nominations until Sept. 30, 2014.
A HUD program to sell its most delinquent mortgages to private investors is producing modest returns when it comes to keeping those struggling borrowers in their homes. To date, 2,049 mortgages sold to investors under the program have been reworked to allow the delinquent borrowers to remain in their homes and start making payments again, although the overwhelming majority of the 73,000 sold troubled mortgages have been foreclosed on. Roughly half of the loans remain delinquent and have yet to be reworked, sold or foreclosed. HUD began selling the mortgages to private investors in an... Read more
The New York attorney general's office has filed a lawsuit against regional lender Evans Bank, accusing it of denying mortgages to African-Americans regardless of their credit. Prosecutors claim the bank created a map that defined a “trade area,” places in the Buffalo region where the bank would make mortgages and other loans. The map excluded much of Buffalo’s East Side, with its large minority population. From 2009 to 2012, Evans received 1,114 applications for residential mortgages, but only four came from African-American applicants. The charges come amid a spate of discriminatory... Read more
A federal bankruptcy judge has told OneUnited Bank that it must wait for $2.9 million raised in a real estate auction by its borrower, the Charles Street African Methodist Episcopal Church, until the two sides have resolved their remaining legal disputes. The legal fight has dragged on since the church filed for bankruptcy in March 2012. The Charles Street AME church owes nearly $5 million to OneUnited after falling behind on a $3.4 million construction loan in 2008 and 2009 while building a community center. It also owes $1.3 million on a loan secured by the church... Read more
An ambitious 25-year social mobility study illustrates the strong effect of children's socioeconomic background in their adult lives. Starting in 1982, researchers kept track of 790 Baltimore first graders from diverse social and economic backgrounds as they matured and entered adulthood. Less than half of the group graduated high school on time. At age 28, more than 10 percent of the black men in the study were incarcerated. A mere 4 percent of the first-graders classified as the “urban disadvantaged” had by the end of the study completed the college degree. Just 33 of 314 raised in the... Read more