Black-Focused Neobank First Boulevard Raises $5 Million

Donald Hawkins and Asya Bradley, Co-Founders of Neobank First Boulevard, joins Yahoo Finance’s Kristin Myers to discuss the company’s work in helping close the racial wealth gap.

Video Transcript

KRISTIN MYERS: Welcome back to "Yahoo Finance Live." Now, Black Americans are often underbanked, while studies find that people of color often have to pay more for financial services, at least compared to their white counterparts. Now our next guests hope to change that with their online bank, First Boulevard. We're joined now by Donald Hawkins, First Boulevard Neobank co-founder and CEO, as well as Asya Bradley, First Boulevard Neobank's co-founder and COO. So I want to throw this to you both. I'm hoping you can highlight some of the unique financial challenges that really face the Black community today.

DONALD HAWKINS: It's a lot of challenges out there. I mean, I've been hearing the segments discussing COVID-19 and the pandemic in general. And communities of color, especially Black America are affected at a disproportionately higher rate as a result. If you think about the way our current economy is set up and a lot of people think things are working in the right direction, but Black America, as a whole, is actually behind in a lot of those different industries and features.

As an example, in the real estate realm, Black Americans are actually fewer homeowners now nowadays than compared in the '60s. When you think about things like the wealth gap, it's the worst that it's ever been. And pretty much every negative financial statistic you can think about when it comes to a community in America, Black America is at the top of that list. It's a lot of things that we're working against right now.

KRISTIN MYERS: Asya, I'm going to come to you for this one. As I mentioned just in the introduction to you both, Black Americans typically don't have the same level of access to banking services, compared to their white counterparts. So how will leveraging technology and making an online-only bank change that?

ASYA BRADLEY: Well, I think for one, you don't have that same visibility of having to sort of adjust your appearance as you walk into a bank branch to get some financial services. I often give this example of very wealthy individuals that try to go into a bank to get service, and they're not able to.

And so, we're building a bank for the melanated community for Black America that's being built by the people that it actually serves. And so, it's really great, and I see some statistics on your screen that's actually pointing to our team makeup, which is pretty incredible. And you never see this in tech, but this is the point, is that with tech, you can essentially build everything that you need. And we can look at solving problems like KYC, which is Know Your Customer, using tech.

KRISTIN MYERS: Now, some of what you mentioned is, frankly, discrimination, you know, that Black Americans face once they walk into the bank. And I think that that causes a lot of well-founded fears and mistrust in the Black community of financial services. So I imagine, however, the bank where you can't go inside might exacerbate some of those fears, some of that mistrust. I'm wondering if you're seeing that. And if so, how do you overcome some of those fears and some of that mistrust that already exists in the Black community, some of that skepticism around banking and financial services?

DONALD HAWKINS: Well, I think something that's really important to note is that representation matters. And the Black community has largely been blocked, right, from being involved in the way our financial system was set up. The other cool thing that really is great for the market that we're really going after is we're America's most mobile exclusive community. 81% of Black America exclusively banks through their mobile device.

And the pandemic has actually pushed that rate even more so forward, just because you can't really go into branches the way you used to. So by representing the market that we're targeting, we're really meeting their direct needs. And we feel that's a very differentiating factor that helps us stand out from a lot of the existing entities that are out there.

And that makes people feel a lot more comfortable, knowing that they're dealing with someone that deals with the same issues and struggles that they have as well. And we're really putting a heavy focus on the tech behind financial technology to ensure that we help our members get the results that they want.

KRISTIN MYERS: Now, Asya, how does First Boulevard really differ from some other online banking services? Chime comes to mind.

ASYA BRADLEY: Well, I mean, take a look at the screen right now. Donald is my co-founder. So we've got a Black man. We've got a Brown woman. Number one, again, as Donald said, representation matters. We are basically our audience that we're building for. We didn't just have to bring in a rapper to represent us or be our ambassador.

We actually are a team of 2/3 female in our leadership team. 2/3 of our leadership team is Black. We've got gender parity across our company. We have LGBTQ representation. I mean, we've got everything in our community. And we are proof that there isn't a pipeline problem. There is a racism problem, but there's no pipeline problem because qualified people exist in all of the different races and all of the different colors. And we have them on our team.

KRISTIN MYERS: I'm wondering-- and this is a question that we ask a lot of these tech companies that are coming in and really changing the game, so to speak, on how we traditionally see things done. I'm wondering if you think that what you guys are doing over at First Boulevard is really going to force other perhaps just even Black-owned banks to really start innovating and leveraging tech going forward.

DONALD HAWKINS: We hope so. I mean, right now, the Black community needs as much support as possible. I mean, even the way we ended up developing this concept was based around a lot of the civic unrest that we experienced over the years, especially last year. And we hope that people see that if a startup in the Neobank space can really make some noise, that there's other things that people can do.

I mean, there are 42 million Black Americans right now, you know, that need assistance. And we feel some of the existing Black banks are also great candidates to make a lot of things happen in a positive direction. And we're actually looking forward to working with them as well, as a force multiplier, to help our members succeed.

KRISTIN MYERS: Now, Asya, last question to you. We have, like, 30 seconds left. But I'm wondering if you can touch on what getting funding was like. We talked to a lot of Black entrepreneurs, and they say that it is incredibly difficult. What was that process like for you both?

ASYA BRADLEY: You know, it was incredible. I don't think Donald and I realized the number of amazing people that there are in VC that are willing to fund people like he and I. I think a big shout out to Anthemis, and Katie and Jillian in particular, because they've really been about the work since before anything happened last summer. So their fund is actually built specifically for this to sort of support the non-traditional or underrepresented founders, such as Donald and myself.

And we're also backed by other funds that don't even work in the diversity space, but they recognized that this is something that needed to be built. They also recognized Donald and my sort of background in sort of original OG status in the fintech space. And so they kind of bet on us as being the frontliners for this.

KRISTIN MYERS: All right, First Boulevard Neobank co-founders Donald Hawkins, Asya Bradley, thank you both for joining us for this very important conversation today.