Business

Wells Fargo Launches Banking Inclusion Initiative to Help Unbanked

African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans Get Access yo Low-Cost Banking

Published

2 years ago

May 21, 2021

On Monday, Wells Fargo announced the Banking Inclusion Initiative, a 10-year commitment to help unbanked individuals gain access to affordable, mainstream, digitally-enabled transactional accounts – a meaningful entry point to fully participating in the economy and achieving financial stability.

The initiative will focus on reaching unbanked communities and, in particular, helping remove barriers to financial inclusion for Black and African American, Hispanic, and Native American/Alaska Native families, which account for more than half of America’s 7 million unbanked households1. It also will assist those who are underbanked or underserved – individuals who may have a bank account yet continue to use high cost, non-bank services and have similar needs.

Wells Fargo will bring together multiple national and community stakeholders to roll out the broad-based initiative that is designed to increase access to affordable products, digital banking and financial guidance within unbanked communities. Through this initiative, Wells Fargo also will collaborate with partners to explore solutions to the credit challenges facing unbanked individuals.

This year, the bank will work with partners to set and begin measuring a 10-year goal for reducing the number of people who are unbanked, with milestones along the way.

According to 2019 FDIC data1, 12.2 percent of Hispanic households, 13.8% of Black households, and 16.3% of American Indian/Alaska Native households in the U.S. don’t have access to a mainstream checking account – compared with 2.5% of white and 1.7% of Asian households.

The FDIC also reports that while these figures have been trending downward, the number of unbanked households will likely increase in the aftermath of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

“We recognize the high number of unbanked households is a complex and long-standing issue that will require gathering the best minds, ideas, products and educational resources from across our communities to bring about change,” said CEO Charlie Scharf. “Through our Initiative, we will organize our resources under one umbrella and work with a broad and diverse group of stakeholders on a sustained multi-year effort to accelerate financial inclusion in the U.S.”

The commitment will be organized around three areas:

1. Access to Affordable Products and Digital Solutions

Wells Fargo will deepen its existing relationships with Black-owned Minority Depository Institutions (MDIs) to support their work in the communities they serve, including outreach efforts and providing the option for their customers to withdraw cash from Wells Fargo’s ATMs and incur no Wells Fargo fees. In addition, Wells Fargo is offering access to a dedicated relationship team that will work with each MDI on financial, technological and product development strategies to help strengthen and grow their institutions.

· In recognition that unbanked and underbanked individuals need access to short-term credit, Wells Fargo will increase funding and support to expand the Credit Builders Alliance (CBA) low-cost, credit-building consumer loan program. The organization’s CBA Fund will provide patient loan capital, capacity-building grants and technical assistance to their nonprofit lender members, enabling low-cost consumer loans for low- to moderate-income (LMI) individuals to meet short term cash needs and establish or improve their credit scores.

Wells Fargo will increase awareness and outreach about low-cost, no–overdraft fee accounts, such as Wells Fargo’s Bank On-certified Clear Access Banking.

· Wells Fargo will broaden its collaboration with CFE Fund and local Bank On coalitions to pilot new strategies and approaches that help overcome barriers to banking access in several markets with high concentrations of unbanked households. The program will focus on helping those who are unbanked navigate the financial system, develop an easier, more seamless path for them to open a Bank On-certified account and access services they need within mainstream banking. It will be used to identify best practices that can be applied on a national scale.

· Wells Fargo will work closely with Fintechs that are deeply committed to helping underserved communities. For instance, Wells Fargo is among the investors in Greenwood, a digital platform for Black and Latino individuals and business owners. The bank also has started a collaboration to help the Fintech MoCaFi provide banking to unbanked individuals, starting with offering MoCaFi customers the ability to use their MoCaFi debit card at Wells Fargo ATMs without incurring fees from Wells Fargo.

2. Financial Education and Advice

· Wells Fargo is working with the Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) Community Development Action Coalition to launch Our Money Matters, a comprehensive financial wellness initiative for college students of color, who disproportionally face greater financial challenges and college debt. The initiative aims to equip students with much needed financial capability skills and access to support services. Over the next 3 years, the program will expand to 25 HBCUs and Minority Serving Institutions.

3. Launching National Advisory Task Force

· Recognizing the difficulty of addressing the unbanked issue in the U.S., Wells Fargo will establish and lead a broad coalition to help with this multi-year commitment. Wells Fargo is forming a National Unbanked Advisory Task Force that will work with the bank in developing solutions to bring more people into the banking system from underserved communities, while also providing feedback on the initiatives that will be implemented and helping determine the best ways to measure success. The task force will feature representatives from leading organizations, including LULAC (League of United Latin American Citizens), NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), National Bankers Association, NCAI (National Congress of American Indians), UnidosUS, National Urban League, and Mississippi-based Hope Enterprise Corporation.

“With branches in more communities than any other financial institution, we believe we have a responsibility to do even more to help address this issue and the pandemic has increased the urgency,” said Mary Mack, CEO of Consumer and Small Business Banking at Wells Fargo. “It is why we’re launching this comprehensive initiative. It is our hope, working closely with our partners, we will be able to make a difference over time in addressing such a critical problem for our society.”

Edith Rocío Robles is an assistant vice president for Corporate Communications.

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Black Cultural Zone, Block Inc., Gives Boost to Black Entrepreneurs

Black Cultural Zone (BCZ) and Block Inc., co-opened a space called “Uptown Market: The Best of Oakland” on Thursday, Aug. 17. They have created a free-to-use retail space in order to give small business owners a more expansive market.

Published

8 hours ago

October 2, 2023

Oakland Post

The market is open from Wednesday to Friday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Every market day there will be multiple stations to shop at as well as a food station. The vendors are rotated every 30 days, so each time someone visits there may be new products to purchase.

By Daisha Williams

Post Staff

Block Inc. is a tech company that owns Uptown Station, a historic building in the heart of downtown Oakland. On the upper floors is office space, and the first floor is home to their Community Hub in addition to Uptown Market.

Located at 1955 Broadway, Block opened Uptown Station in 2020, with the intention of using this space to support entrepreneurs. They’ve been partnering with BCZ since the pandemic, and together, with the creation of this space, they have done just that.

The vendors, who were chosen through an application process earlier in the year, all went through a training workshop, with the goal that at the end of their experience with them they will have gained all the skills necessary to open and manage their own storefront.

COVID-19 caused many small businesses to close — especially BIPOC businesses. BCZ and Block are attempting to remedy this, using Uptown Market as a way to help these businesses get back on their feet and continue to thrive.

“We hope that by the end of the program they will have the knowledge and experience that they can take to scale their business into a brick-and-mortar space — not just Downtown, but in other opportunities of Oakland that Black Cultural Zone is also investing in,” said Jazmine Kelly.

BCZ has been putting on events like these to help strengthen the Black community by circulating the Black dollar since 2014. During the pandemic, they created and regulated Akoma Market to help businesses stay afloat. Since then, they’ve hosted markets at Liberation Park in 7101 Foothill Blvd. in East Oakland.

Carolyn Johnson, CEO of BCZ, talked about why they made the shift from these outdoor markets to Uptown Station:

“A great step for those vendors that are still with us is to give them the opportunity to be in a retail space, to get a sense of what a brick-and-mortar feels like: what it means to deal with your inventory, to get the support you need, the systems you need, and to engage one-on-one with a different group of people that come to downtown Oakland as opposed to East Oakland.”

This market was created with hopes that they would be able to create something more stable and beneficial long-term for businesses, and Uptown Market is the realization of that dream.

#NNPA BlackPress

Seniors Organize for Dignity at Sojourner Truth Manor

“They’re not treating us seniors like we’re human beings; since this management company has been here, there is no communication whatsoever,” said Beverley Colston, who has lived at Sojourner Truth for eight years and serves as the chairperson of the tenant association.

Published

3 days ago

September 30, 2023

Ken Epstein

Tenants at Sojourner Truth Manor, like those above, complain that the manager, HumanGood, only communicates in English and provides no translation for non-English speakers. Photo by Ken Epstein.

By Ken Epstein

Residents of Sojourner Truth Manor in North Oakland, a housing complex for seniors founded by local civil rights and community leaders almost 50 years ago, are involved in a fight for dignity and decent living conditions with HumanGood, a nonprofit company that manages senior housing in Oakland and across the country.

Tenants interviewed by the Oakland Post said that they are kept in the dark about what the management is planning or what repairs are underway. They say management often does not respond to their complaints and concerns about needed repairs such as broken fixtures, flooding, and lack of heat or hot water in individual apartments, vermin, broken security cameras, televisions and building elevators, while the complex’s community room has been out of operation for 11 years.

More general concerns are the lack of a social service coordinator, a position that in the past offered community-building activities and provided information and support for residents. Tenants are also concerned about the failure to provide translation for tenants who are not English-speaking, including those who are Ethiopian, Eritrean, Vietnamese, Cambodian, or Arabic-speaking.

Beverly Colston, an eight-year tenant at Sojourner Truth Manor, serves as chairperson of the tenant association. Photo by Ken Epstein.

Underscoring the lack of transparency, 14-year-resident Nancy Delaney said, “Management is treating us like we’re livestock; they feel they don’t have to give us common courtesy, even to tell us what they’re doing.”

Sojourner Truth, located at 6015 Martin Luther King Jr. Way in Oakland, consists of three buildings with 74 studios and 13 one-bedroom apartments.

In the past few years, there has been turn-over of management companies that operate and maintain the complex. Since mid-2022, Sojourner Truth has been managed by HumanGood, the largest nonprofit provider of senior housing and services in California and among the 10 largest organizations of its kind in the nation, according to reports on the internet.

In Oakland, besides Sojourner Truth, HumanGood operates at Piedmont Gardens, Allen Temple’s senior residences, JL Richard Terrace and Irene Cooper Terrace.

Overall, the company has over 5,000 employees and serves over 14,000 residents in seven states.

Annual reports on the nonprofit senior living market sector are produced by LeadingEdge Ziegler 200. Ziegler is described on its website, as a “privately held investment bank, capital markets and proprietary investments firm and the nation’s leading underwriters of financings for not-for-profit senior living providers.”

While the lack of repairs is a serious concern for many tenants, the most pressing need at Sojourner Truth, said Colston, is to hire a full-time social services coordinator, a social worker “who would serve as an advocate for tenants with management and help with recertification for food stamps, health services and all the other forms we have to submit on a yearly basis.”

“We have too many people who speak too many different languages, and we get written notices in English,” she said. “They don’t communicate with us except by letters, and we often don’t understand them.”

The tenants need someone who can patiently and respectfully explain these notices, Colson said. In the past, the social services coordinator also organized bingo, exercise sessions, dominos, activities and celebrations of holidays and birthdays, she said.

In fairness, Colston said, the deterioration of physical conditions at Sojourner Truth did not begin with HumanGood but with the previous manager, Christian Church Homes. HumanGood is responsible for not communicating. “With these people here, there is no communication whatsoever,” she said.

By the Oakland Post’s deadline, HumanGood had not replied to email questions. Calls to the office of Sojourner Truth were not picked up.

Tenants at Sojourner Truth have been meeting with residents of Harriet Tubman Terrace apartments in Berkeley who are also pushing for improved conditions.