What happened to Wall Street's post-George Floyd bet on Black banking?
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In 2020, Paul Judge and Ryan Glover, both seasoned Black entrepreneurs, started work on a plan to help solve one of America's most intractable social problems: the yawning wealth gap between White households and Black and Latino families.
After facing decades of discrimination by banks, Black and Latino customers need a safe, welcoming place to put their money, they argued, as they developed a plan for launching Greenwood, a banking platform rather than a traditional bank.
Launched amid the racial justice protests that followed the police killing of George Floyd in 2020, Greenwood quickly drew support from prominent Black celebrities, including music producer Jermaine Dupri, and banking giants such as Wells Fargo and JPMorgan Chase. Glover and Judge boasted that 700,000 potential customers had signed up for Greenwood's wait list before it even launched products.
But in the three years since, and after a second round of funding that valued the company at $325 million, Greenwood has failed to meet some of its initial goals, according to a review of public statements and interviews with company leaders and former employees. Less than a quarter, about 150,000, of the people on the waiting list opened accounts and Greenwood has been slow to launch promised financial products, including credit cards and business loans.
Instead the company has acquired a portfolio of companies outside of the world of finance, including a private club in Atlanta, and a website that bills itself as "Black LinkedIn." It also opened a production studio, which released a docuseries that follows efforts to revitalize the Greenwood District in Tulsa, which was leveled by a White mob in 1921. Meanwhile, California state regulators have told Greenwood to make clear that it is not itself a "bank" and it was sued by a former business partner who alleged that the company was in "financial disarray." Three top executives, who were recruited with much fanfare, have either left or been laid off and taken their expertise with them.
In an interview, Glover dismissed concerns about Greenwood's progress and said the historically fraught relationship between the Black community and the financial sector requires that Atlanta-based Greenwood be unlike anything else in the financial industry. It's just as important for the company to create a place where Black and Latino consumers can learn and network as it is to provide them with banking services, he said.
"We've been programmed and trained [to believe] that banks aren't our friends," he said. "My mission is to change that narrative and educate our community that having access to capital and safe banking relationships matter to build wealth."
The company's struggles aren't surprising, industry experts say. After decades of consolidation in the banking industry, Greenwood, with its 150,000 customers, is simply too small to have a significant impact on the financial services market, said William Cunningham, an economist who has been studying the Black banking sector for more than 25 years.
"All of this stuff is cute. Greenwood is cute," he said. "It sounds pretty harsh, but basically, neither Greenwood, nor any of the traditional Black banks really, have the ability to do what it is they claim that they want to do, which is better serve Black customers while turning a profit, because they're just too small."
Greenwood has taken on a monumental task. About half of Black adults and one third of Latinos are either unbanked or underbanked, meaning they don't have a traditional checking or savings account and use alternative financial services like payday lenders or title shops for loans, according to the Federal Reserve. That's compared to 15 percent of White Americans.
Without traditional bank accounts that often make it easier to secure loans, these Black and Latino customers fall further behind economically, increasing the country's racial wealth gap, experts say. The median wealth, a household's assets minus debts, of White families stands at $285,000, compared to $44,900 for Black families and $61,600 for Hispanic families, according to the Federal Reserve.
Bridging that gap requires a financial company unlike any that has existed before, said Glover, pointing to their efforts to educate customers on personal finance.
When Judge approached Glover with the idea to start Greenwood in early 2020, Glover, who was 49 at the time, was trying to figure out what he wanted to do with the rest of his career. He had founded Noontime Records, a label that produced more than a dozen Billboard No. 1 hits, in the early 2000s. In August 2017, he had sold Bounce TV, the first Black-owned television broadcast company, to E.W. Scripps in a $292 million deal. He had gone from working more than 120 hours a week to a life of leisure.
"I really didn't know what I wanted to do with my life," he said. "I knew I didn't want to stay at home and bug my children and my wife to death."
Judge had spent years in the tech world, founding Pindrop Security, an information security company valued at nearly $1 billion. According to Judge, through his venture funds, he has also invested in more than 60 technology start-ups over the years.
Glover assumed that Greenwood would start small, with his initial models projecting that it would have as few as 5,000 customers when it launched. But that all changed after Floyd's death.
Racial justice protests had put a spotlight on long-standing racial inequalities. In a viral social media trend, people were encouraged to put money into Black banks. Netflix moved $100 million, about 2 percent of their total deposits, to such institutions.
The movement supercharged Greenwood's launch and within days of rolling out its website in October 2020, tens of thousands of people had signed up for the waiting list for checking accounts. Glover and Judge recruited rapper and activist Michael Render, who goes by the stage name of Killer Mike, to be the public face of the brand, in exchange for an equity stake in the company.
Money began to pour in from the big banks looking to fulfill their post-Floyd promises to make right decades of discriminatory practices. By March 2021, before it had even launched a product, Greenwood had raised millions from financial giants like JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo. (The banks didn't return calls seeking comment on Greenwood's progress.)
Greenwood seemed poised to become a new kind of Black-owned financial institution. But Judge and Glover were facing an uphill battle in a fiercely competitive environment. Black banks had been struggling to survive for years: In 2001, there were 41 Black-owned banks, but by the end of 2022, there were just 17, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.
Black-owned banks simply can't keep pace with their much larger competitors, such as JPMorgan Chase, which had trillions in assets, industry experts say.
The struggles of Black banks reflect the struggles of the Black community, said Brandon Comer, co-founder of the National Black Bank Foundation.
"They are serving a customer base that hasn't historically had ability to generate and create wealth," said Comer. "And so over time, they don't have the same level of profitability and the ability to reinvest in the bank so they just kind of slowly keep falling further and further behind their competitors."
One of Glover and Judge's first big decisions was picking a banking partner. Greenwood is an online banking platform but doesn't have a banking license and, to have customers' accounts insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, must partner with a traditional bank.
Glover had initially pledged that Greenwood would partner with a Black-owned bank, but instead decided to work with Coastal Community Bank, an Everett, Wash., bank which has a mostly White executive management team.
Eric Sprink, chief executive of Coastal, said he reached out to Glover in 2021 after he learned Greenwood had the backing of many of the country's largest banks. "Greenwood was one of only two partners that I have personally called on to tell them I would like to be the bank to work with them," Sprink said.
Glover said they couldn't find a Black bank big enough to support their scale and Coastal already had established relations with other high profile start-ups.
"This is still majority minority-owned," Glover said of Greenwood. "Almost 98 percent of our customers are minorities, 98 percent of my workforce, who are making the decisions day in and day out, are minorities. At the end of the day, this is a business that is for us and by us."
As Greenwood launched, it missed key deadlines - including with checking accounts, which weren't offered until early 2022, nearly a year after its initial projections. There is still not a timeline for rolling out credit cards and small business loans.
The delays with those financial products, Glover said, were due to higher than expected customer demand. According to Glover, Greenwood currently has 150,000 active accounts, but is still seeing steady interest from potential new customers.
Meanwhile, Greenwood opened a studio to record personal finance content - from how to build credit to how launch a company - that it distributes online. In May 2022, it purchased the Gathering Spot, a private club with locations in Atlanta and Los Angeles, for $50 million. A month later it acquired Valance, a professional development and job recruitment company.
The additions expand the company's ecosystem for its customers, while the company continues to focus on putting "best-in-class" banking products in the reach of Black and Latino customers, Glover said. Late last year, Greenwood launched the "Elevate Card," or what Glover calls, "the real Black card." With the debit card, which has a $200 a month fee, customers gain access to the entire suite of Greenwood's products. This month, they announced the launch of Greenwood Invest, a stock trading and investing app.
But as they've grown, the company has come under the scrutiny of regulators. In December 2022, Greenwood signed a cease and desist agreement with the California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation pledging to stop referring to itself as a "bank" and more clearly disclose that they are a financial technology company working with banking partners.
Glover said that the agreement has had little impact and the company is now making appropriate disclosures.
The same month, Greenwood closed a second round of funding, which raised an additional $45 million.
The company's problems began to spill out into public view when the former owners of the Gathering Spot sued Greenwood for an alleged unpaid debt and claimed that the fintech was in "financial disarray." The lawsuit was settled in August.
In a statement, Glover denied that Greenwood was facing financial difficulties, saying that the company had enough cash to operate for two years "even if there was no revenue growth."
But its turmoil has disturbed some customers.
Dominec Holmes, a marketing consultant from Michigan, said he signed up for the Greenwood waiting list in 2020 after learning that Killer Mike was one of the company's founders. After months on the waitlist, Holmes opened a checking account.
But he closed the account three months later, he said, after learning Greenwood wasn't a traditional Black bank and had partnered with Coastal Community Bank. Now, Holmes says he's researching traditional Black-owned banks where he can move his money.
"I want to put my money in a bank that I know is investing in the Black community and Black businesses," he said.
The Gathering Spot's former owners said in an Instagram post last month that they had regained control of the clubs. In a statement, Greenwood said the companies will continue to work together and "remain supportive of each other's growth as they transition back to operating as separate entities."
Glover acknowledges the company's leaders are still trying to determine the path forward for Greenwood and had recently laid off workers, the number of which he didn't quantify. The layoffs were not due to financial necessity but instead an effort to keep the company nimble, he said.
But the company is strong, he said, adding that its banking revenue doubled in 2023. "This is not my first rodeo from a start-up perspective," he said. "As we continue to grow our customer base and we continue to grow our product base and content base, we will have to move and shift staff and resources."
Meanwhile, the banking industry is closely watching Greenwood's progress.
Ashley Bell, co-founder of the National Black Bank Foundation, said that he is attempting to buy a small Utah-based bank that he can turn into a Black-owned institution. He has approached many of the big banks that funded Greenwood, but hasn't received much interest, he said.
"We are cheering for Greenwood to become what it promised to be," said Bell. "Because as someone who is raising capital to create new Black banks in this country, when you go to the big banks on Wall Street right now that well is dry because Greenwood hit the market at the right time with the right message."
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