204 Equality Through Wealth w/ Teri Williams | President of Largest Black-Owned Bank in America OneUnited

Christopher Lochhead Follow Your Different™

Teri Williams is the legendary President and Chief Operating Officer of OneUnited Bank. She is helping transform the country with the empire she is currently building. From purchasing a small struggling community bank in Boston to creating OneUnited Bank, the largest black-owned bank in the United States of America. Since they have started, Teri and her husband, Kevin, with their team have made over $1 billion in loans together. Along with being an entrepreneur, she is also an author with her book, I Got Bank!: What My Granddad Taught Me About Money. Today, we have a powerful conversation about OneUnited Bank’s mission and how the couple runs a successful powerful business while raising two wonderful children. Teri has some fascinating insights on what it really means to make money and the statistics of the black community in the financial system. We also talk about how Teri and Kevin are showing how banking and entrepreneurship can change lives, communities, and even a country. The OneUnitedBank OneUnited Bank is the largest black-owned bank in the country. It has not only started as a community but is also transforming to becoming a digital bank. The goal they have is to make financial literacy a core value in the black community. Teri gives a bit of her personal background and story, and how she learned business from her grandmother. She shares how one of the important things for the black community is to recognize those individuals who have been there, eliminate the carried shame, and value one’s experiences. “We're finding ourselves not being able to speak in our authentic voice. We're finding that our community is not listening to us because we're not speaking in our authentic voice. So we have changed our communication. It was important for us, as a bank, to speak to the challenges that our community faces, not to run away from them. From that came this bank black movement. It is a bank black movement where black people can speak how they are going to move their money to black owned banks and are going to support black businesses.” - Teri Williams Black Communities in the Financial System Teri discusses the statistics and the poor treatment of the black community in the financial system. She shares how the homeownership rate in the black community is 30 percent lower compared to the white community. The number of loans and mortgages from national banks is 1 to 2 percent of all mortgages that are given to black families. Though, there is hope. OneUnited Banks is creating partnerships and transacting with big corporations that are currently making big differences to the community. “Netflix was the first to come out with this. Because of corporations like them, a lot of corporations have followed. I think the corporations realize that this is a way to contribute to what these banks are trying to do. It's also important for people to know what we do. Over 70% of our lending actually goes into the community and our credit losses are almost zero. It's not like we're doing lending that is risky. We are just doing lending that isn't being done by other institutions. That lending is giving our community an opportunity to build well.” - Teri Williams OneTransaction Campaign and Conference For Black History Month, Teri shares the OneTransaction Campaign and Conference that will be held on Juneteenth (June 19, 2021) from 1:00 - 6:00 PM ET (Eastern Time). The campaign will be a free virtual conference encouraging the black community to focus on one transaction in 2021. It will be filled with amazing speakers who are passionate to educate the community on how they can create generational wealth and close the racial wealth gap. We hope you can virtually join and register for the OneTransaction Campaign and Conference and be part of the conversation. “We give them a choice of six transactions. It could be a will, life insurance, home ownership, having a profitable business, improving their credit score or savings,