Bernice King, Ashley Bell buy bank to boost opportunities for Black home buyers and entrepreneurs

A new holding company run by former White House aide Ashley Bell and Civil Rights icon Bernice A. King says it's making history with the purchase of a bank that aims to boost opportunities for Black home buyers and entrepreneurs.

Redemption Holding Co. said Tuesday in a news release it agreed to buy Holladay Bank and Trust, a 49-year-old community bank that serves a suburb of Salt Lake City and has less than $70 million in assets.

Bell, a former White House policy advisor and Small Business Administration administrator, will serve as RHC's executive chairman and CEO. King, the daughter of the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Coretta Scott King, will serve as the bank's senior vice president of corporate strategy and alliances and also sit on its advisory board. Former NFL player Dhani Jones is also a partner and will sit on the board.

Redemption Holding Co. is a Delaware public benefit corporation formed for the purpose of buying Holladay. It needs regulatory approval to become a registered bank holding company. Financial terms of the deal were not released.

RHC said the deal marks the first time in American history that an existing commercial bank would become a Black-owned Minority Depository Institution through acquisition.

RHC plans to facilitate national, large-scale lending opportunities through technology to create a full-service digital banking platform for its customers; offer SBA lending, and offer loan origination providing mortgages in partnership with major national lending institutions.

Bell and King previously co-founded the National Black Bank Foundation, which has steered $600 million of deal flow into Black banks since 2020, according to the release. Last June, the pair launched a digital banking and payment processing startup called Ready Life with a mission to close the racial wealth gap.

Bell said in the release that Black banks uniquely address the financial realities of communities that have been "systematically excluded, overcharged, and under-capitalized for hundreds of years."

"Redemption will serve as a lifeline to the next wave of Black and Brown first-time home buyers and small business entrepreneurs across the country," Bell said in the release.

As part of a series focused on the intersection of race and money, Atlanta Business Chronicle examined the continued challenges related to funding and scaling a Black-owned business in Atlanta. The funding challenge come from a variety of areas, including that Black-owned businesses face difficulties acquiring capital. RHC's formation aims to help, as Black-owned banks in America have dwindled from 50 in 1976 to just 16 today, according to RHC, which cited the FDIC. 

Initial investors in RHC include a growing number of Black doctors, lawyers, and "business leaders from across the country," according to the release.