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(upbeat whistle)
It's not about getting another deposit,
it's not about getting another loan.
It's about changing America as we know it
One of the things that Black Lives Matter
movement has highlighted is this dramatic inequality
and access to financial services.
Going into traditional big banks, we don't feel welcome.
The $1.2 trillion that we're spending as a community
but we're not represented.
The racial wealth gap is huge.
Dedicate to saving some money in a Black bank.
I had no other alternative,
I didn't know where else to go.
Technology is changing everything about business.
You have to think quickly.
There needed to be a digital transformation.
(mellow music)
Morning everybody, it's DJ Envy, Angela Yee,
Charlamagne Tha God.
We are The Breakfast Club.
We got a special guest in the building.
That's right.
The chairman's and CEO
of OneUnited bank, owner and owner.
That's right.
Kevin Cohee, welcome.
Tell him what OneUnited bank is for us,
just give him a reminder.
OneUnited Bank is the largest Black owned bank
in America.
We want to deliver the knowledge
to Black Americans necessary to build wealth
And then we are going to work with the person
through the entire process of both teaching them
and then motivating them to act.
Money has this sordid history in Black America.
Let's face it, banking is for rich people.
The whole concept was designed for rich people.
You had to have money to even go in a bank.
Building wealth is just information, that's all it is.
It's about six and seven transactions
you need to know in order to systematically build wealth.
We want to eradicate the racial wealth gap.
(mellow music)
(mellow music continues)
Our leaders have always had this dream
of organizing Black America and its allies to be able
to affect change in society.
Well, with OneUnited Bank and people like yourselves
we now have the actual ability to do it.
(mellow music)
OneUnited Bank against the largest Black on bank
in the country and our focus is using technology to improve
the lives of the Black community.
The bank had been growing for years,
but in 2020, everything changed.
The incident in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Rogue police puts their knee on somebody's neck
and kills him.
George Floyd, the actual filming of him was
from a smartphone.
Technology is fundamentally changing every aspect
of our society.
There was an explosion of the use
of social media to get the word out,
to help our community understand
and to also talk about the context of systemic racism.
There was a actual text that went out
to the Black community, move your money
to Black owned banks.
Take your 20, your 30, your 40, your 50
and dedicate to saving some money
in a Black bank every month and develop your business.
We started using the term bank Black.
Others started to use the term bank Black.
Killer Mike started to use the term bank Black.
Other celebrities started to use the term bank Black.
And the term started to spread and money started
to move into Black banks across the country.
The social justice movement around using
the power of your dollars to advocate
for the community started to rise.
And we determined that given who we are,
we needed to lead it.
Black America in this allies rushed
to the doors of OneUnited Bank.
They literally got on their computers
and as a form of social protest started
to sign up for bank accounts.
We went from 20% growth to 100% growth.
Now our systems were overwhelmed
because we're sitting there having to hold America's hands
at this moment of tragedy.
OneUnited Bank was a safe haven,
it was a place of comfort for Black people.
They would call and just want to talk
to us about what's going on.
You start to see this huge growth
and we literally had, like, it was all hands on deck.
Everybody was answering phones.
It's scary because it identifies all the holes
that you didn't even know you had.
It did not feel good at all to anyone.
The abandonment rate in our call center was as high as 15%.
We didn't want to go the way of the dinosaur,
especially seeing so many Black owned banks
and credit unions failing.
Understanding that there needed
to be a digital transformation,
we had to make that transition in order to thrive.
We needed to fix the problems we were having
and we needed to fix it fast.
We had to figure out how to use technology, not
only to meet our customer needs, but to actually
meet our community's needs.
I don't think we could have gotten through this period
without Salesforce and I don't say that lightly.
Our customers were ending us all kinds of communication
that was going into the cloud.
Not just, you know, numbers but actually specific problems.
We had to decide what were the most essential things
that our customers needed and it was truly a triage.
We used the cloud to help us to move those requests
and those inquiries to the right person.
When customers have problems, if they could be addressed
by virtual agent to answer quick questions,
they can do that so that we can use our people
to solve the real you know, hard problems.
It really helped us reduce our abandonment rate
down to a fraction of what it was.
(upbeat music continues)
Being a digital first bank means
understanding what technologies are out there
that you can leverage that makes sense
not only for you as a business, but for your customers.
The federal reserve did a study
and determined that 49% of the Black community
is underbanked or unbanked.
They don't have access to the full range
of banking services.
Now, what has that done?
That left a gap.
It left a gap for predators.
(pensive music)
We use these terms like payday lending
to describe this whole class of predatory companies
and individuals that prey on Black communities.
It could be something as simple as your car breaking down
and you need a $700 repair or one of your children
getting sick and needing to go to the doctor
and you need a $1,000.
We listen to our customers, we look at their data,
we listen to them on social media.
We needed to offer a short term, small dollar loan program
because our customers were using payday lenders
to get you know, what they needed
in order to get through the week.
(upbeat music continues)
Payday loans have just been horrible for our community.
They charge high rates.
The rates are 400% minimum.
They have a lot of hidden fees.
So we know payday loans, they charge 400%, right,
on average.
How do we do something that's more reasonable?
As we were thinking about this whole payday lending area
we were like, how can we solve this?
But we need to not lose money by doing it.
To be honest with you, we weren't sure we could do it.
The racial wealth cap is this not because white Americans
or smarter than Black Americans,
it was we were the opportunity to be successful.
As slavery was coming to an end,
there was actually at one point a deal negotiated
with the United States government that would've given
every Black person in America 40 acres and a mule.
Black Wall Street was a section of Tulsa, Oklahoma
that was very prosperous.
This was a place where there were many Black professionals
and a great deal of income and wealth accumulation
among the Black population.
You may ask yourself, why was this the most
prosperous community of Black people in Tulsa, Oklahoma?
Well, the reason is Black people got the 40 acres
and the mule.
My great, great grandfather Charles Cohee
was instrumental in negotiating
with the United States government to get that land.
Black Americans had that opportunity
to to raise their children and peace, to educate them,
to live a life with dignity and respect.
Understanding the importance of circulating our dollars
amongst ourselves to build our businesses,
to create the American dream.
(somber music)
(somber music continues)
It was ultimately burned to the ground
by white supremacists and that of course is a challenge
that we faced throughout the history of America.
There was a much larger message here.
Black economic success is unacceptable
and is punishable by death and property destruction.
And it's that denial of opportunity that creates things
like the racial wealth gap.
Our forefathers actually talked about us
garnering our spending power to support our community.
So it's been a long history of people understanding
that we needed to use our spending power
to improve our wealth.
Shifting people's mindset.
Don't worry about that cup of coffee you're buying,
focus on your income, focus on your debt.
I say, buy something even if it's a hut.
Focus on the things that can really close that wealth gap
for your family.
Don't get distracted by the negativity
that's out there that just says, oh, we spend too much
and we spend it on the wrong things, 'cause that's not true.
(pensive music)
Money in our family has been a hard topic.
We didn't have a whole lot of it growing up.
Mom, you know she would make a dollar out of 15 cent.
I know that's kind of cliche to say
but that is definitely the truth.
I had a car.
I had that car stolen from me four times in one year.
Every time that car got stolen, I had to pay the insurance
company a $1,000.
It put me in such financial ruin
and it gets really really scary.
It's tough, fills you with anxiety,
that drove me to payday loans
and payday loans I do not recommend.
Most people who take out a payday loan
are unable to pay it back within the period.
And so they take out another payday loan
to pay back the first one and then they may take out
another loan and another loan and another loan.
Didn't know where else to go
to get the help or the relief that I needed
for bills for that little short period of time.
We recognize that actually we could offer
this program that we call CashPlease,
in a way that, you know, it'll probably be a breakeven.
If you're only charging, you know, 23%
like in this case, then you need four people to pay you back
for every one loan that you...
That's just the breakeven.
And that's-
That's the breakeven.
And that's at the breakeven.
Right.
That's just the breakeven.
The one customer pays
for four people to go to fault.
Yes, that that's actually actually right.
We don't check the-
We don't check,
but if they pay on time, we're reporting it.
And if they don't pay,
we're-
It gets reported as well.
So those that pay us back, they get an additional benefit
over a payday loan.
Yes.
Because they're building and establishing credit.
Yeah.
One of the other issues that we saw with payday lending
is that they only reported when people
didn't pay back the loans and for us
that's the opposite of what we were trying to do.
Like, why aren't more banks doing this?
And there are a lot of other banks
that don't have the technology footprint that we have.
I'm just saying it.
Yeah.
I don't think banks have done it before in the past.
Small dollar, you got to do a lot of volume.
They don't want to do this manually.
Part of the reason that people go to payday lenders
is because they get the money immediately
and we had to figure out how we can not only make
the credit decision but actually get it
into people's account, the money into their account.
We set the goal of four hours.
So we're doing it?
Yeah.
Yeah?
Yes, absolutely.
Absolutely, yes.
You don't have to be predatory,
you don't have to do the wrong thing.
You do the right thing, you will build a business
for generations and not just for a moment in time.
Once we realized that we did have all the tools to do it
I gave the team four months to get it done.
(mellow music)
(mellow music continues)
As we're developing the CashPlease program,
we're running into a couple
of different technology challenges.
There's real pressure all over.
Yeah.
Like it makes me
uncomfortable-
Right.
Launching like, into this new space.
Because-
Like,
what's the percentage of our customers
are going to be successful having this kind of product,
right?
You had the foundation
with Salesforce that allowed us to build
out a program where we could approve customers quickly.
Now we have the ability to take into account thousands
of variables in evaluating a person's ability
to pay back a small dollar short term loan.
When somebody's not having their best day,
that's when you'll be in your finest hour to help them.
So that's what we're here for and whatever it takes
to get it done, that's what we're going to do.
I don't know like how we would get this done without
the help of Salesforce.
What's the percentage
for the customers?
Once we figured out
a way to offer this program, to offer CashPlease,
our goal is to spread that word
and it's to spread it through social media.
We have a lot of influencers, a lot of celebrities,
a lot of spokespeople.
I'm going to use Tiffany Haddish.
She's one that has talked about her journey
and her need to be frugal.
These are community focused influencers
that support the bank and that we support.
Let's check out this-
Okay.
This Kevin Roselin I think-
Okay.
Is fine.
All right.
I got all these ideas and thoughts.
You can do something for the ladies,
maybe go the Maxwell route.
(Kevin hums melodically)
I was delighted to see that as the messaging got out there
that people were like, I'm down, I'm ready, here's my money.
Where do I go, what do I do
and let me bring my network along.
We live in a place where there's not a physical location
for OneUnited, but I chose that one.
It's the largest and the most established.
It wasn't a problem in the digital world.
It was very gratifying to see bank Black takeoff,
putting a name to something, defining it
and I did my share of hashtag also for that,
just to remind people online and help out.
Anything you can do to try to further your community
in a positive way is definitely something to be proud about.
We used to divine ourselves as a community bank
that happened to be Black.
We said, we're not speaking in our authentic voice.
And we started to say, we are unapologetically Black.
That was actually a risk that a lot of people
said we shouldn't take.
Some of us that are older we were raised with this idea
that their ice is colder.
If you had a white doctor and a Black doctor,
go to the white doctor.
If you have a white cleaners and a Black cleaners,
go to the white cleaners.
Their business is going to be better.
It's almost like one of these things where you're like, wow,
imagine if all these years, as opposed to trying
to be something other than ourselves,
we were being our authentic selves.
Since we made that switch, we have tripled in customers.
Tripled!
(upbeat music)
So here we are, you know, a few months later
and CashPlease is launched.
I'm just curious as to how CashPlease
is doing.
We're up.
Okay, great.
And you know,
customers are using it, which is great.
Yeah, yeah.
We're starting
to see things flow through.
Customers are getting their money.
Yeah.
I'm not seeing
any like red flags.
Yeah.
Which is fantastic.
So I'm definitely relieved.
I don't feel relieved.
And I think it's because I just knew it was going to be okay.
Everything about this program is going
to help us close the racial wealth gap.
(hopeful music)
I applied to the CashPlease through OneUnited Bank.
It was totally different from what I've been experiencing
with the payday loans.
It gave you what the terms of their loan was
and what the fees were right up front.
You can look at it right on your phone.
They were so transparent and I felt really, really good.
I'm like, wow, this bank really cares
about helping me get out of a situation.
It's not like they were jacking me up for fees
and things like that and they were most importantly
allowing me time to pay them back.
Economic stress in a lot of cases causes spiritual distress.
You can find spiritual uplifting at the church
and in OneUnited bank, you can find an institution
that its whole purpose is to uplift the community.
So when you think about that, when you think about
we were enslaved for 250 years
and then we had to fight legal discrimination
for another a hundred years, and that it only has only
been 50 years when according to the law,
we've been free of discrimination
we've come a really long way in a very short period of time.
We can serve millions of customers, millions.
That's the technology that we have built.
Think of OneUnited bank as a bank
that is a technology company,
something that has the actual ability
to organize Black America and its allies
on a national basis and not just to provide them
with financial services and products
but to lead to actual important changes in society.
(mellow music)
(speaker murmurs)
Yeah.
(people cheer)
(hopeful music)
We take great pride in being able to provide
and create innovative technology
that can change Black America.
The ability to bring people together in commonality,
working towards something that's beautiful.
We have the technology, we have the resources.
We are here to do nothing short of helping America
to perfect its democracy by creating equal access
to opportunity.
(mellow jazzy music)
(mellow jazzy music continues)
(mellow jazzy music continues)
(air whooshes)
(upbeat whistle)
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