BNC
Bancorp Wants To Cash Out to
Pinnacle, But Fair Finance Watch
Shows Its Weak Record
By Matthew R. Lee
NEW YORK, January
22 – In a Sunday evening
proposed merger announcement,
recently challenged BNC
Bancorp announced it wants to
be acquired by Pinnacle
Financial.
But BNC
has a weak record, as shown by
Fair Finance Watch, and has
made compliance commitments it
has withheld and, it seems,
has yet to implement.
As
reported by Inner City Press
in October, the 2015 Home
Mortgage Disclosure Act data
show that
BNC's
conventional
home purchase
lending to
African
Americans in
the Charleston
MSA has
falling by
over 80% from
2014 to 2015.
And
in the Charleston MSA in 2014
for conventional home purchase
loans, BNC made 173 such loans
to whites and only SIX to
African Americans, and none to
Latinos. For refinance loans, it
made 68 loans to whites and only
ONE to an African American,
while denying the applications
of African Americans 3.94 times
more frequently than those of
whites.
In 2015, things
got substantially
worse. For
conventional home
purchase loans in
the Charleston MSA
in 2015, while BNC
made 45 such loans
to whites, it made
only ONE to an
African American
(down from six in
2014).
So this will be
challenged.
In
the recent past the
Winston-Salem Journal reported:
"regulatory approval was delayed
in part by two New York advocate
groups challenging BNC's lending
practices involving minority and
underserved applicants in its
markets. Inner City Press and
affiliate Fair Finance Watch
filed a protest with the Federal
Reserve under the federal
Community Reinvestment Act. It
is a normal practice of those
groups to challenge
minority-lending practices when
a significant bank purchase is
announced. Fed officials asked
for additional information Dec.
2. BNC responded and asked that
its minority-lending data remain
confidential. Rick Callicutt,
the bank's chief executive and
president, said in April that
because BNC has surpassed $5
billion in total assets, it
faces "a higher level of
expectation to market more
heavily to the underserved in
its markets."
We'll
have more on this.
***
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