OneUnited Bank is the largest Black-owned bank in the United States. It has branches in Boston, Los Angeles, and Miami. It grew from $56 million to over $650 million in assets. It became the first Black-owned digital bank in the country.
None of those sentences generate the kind of press that a new fintech app does. But they should, because what OneUnited represents is something that no app can replace: a regulated, community-anchored financial institution that exists specifically to serve Black depositors and Black borrowers who have been systematically excluded from mainstream banking.
The history of that exclusion is not ancient. Redlining was legal federal policy until 1968. Discriminatory lending practices in home mortgages persisted into the 2000s and contributed directly to Black families losing an estimated $164 billion in wealth during the 2008 financial crisis -- losses that have not been recovered.
“Black wealth doesn't exist without Black banking. Full stop.”
Into that gap, OneUnited does the work that community development banks exist to do: small business loans in Black neighborhoods, mortgages in markets that mainstream banks won't touch, and banking products designed around the financial realities of their actual customers.
Their UNITY Visa card, which features art by Black artists and icons, has become something of a cultural object -- a way of signaling values through a financial product. But the card is a marketing strategy for an institution that is doing serious structural work: building the financial infrastructure that Black economic life depends on.
The conversation about Black wealth tends to focus on consumer brands, venture-backed startups, and individual founders. That is the visible part. OneUnited is the foundation beneath all of it.
