Why is the first Black-owned bank in the West in Utah?

As COVID-19 began to shut the world down, Ashley Bell worried about America’s small businesses. He helped shape the Paycheck Protection Program while working in the first Trump administration, with the idea that banks “would be the first way to reach people who needed help.”

But the relationships he was counting on weren’t there for everyone. “Thousands of small business owners around America,” he realized, “were denied access to the program by their own banks.”

What happened next led to Bell, his partners — including Dr. Bernice King, daughter of the civil rights icon Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. — and investors making history in Utah.

They’ve shepherded the opening of the first Black-owned bank in the West, now open for business in the Salt Lake City suburb of Holladay. On Wednesday, Bell, King and a crowd of about 300 supporters celebrated the recent approval of its new name: Redemption Bank.

Bell is often asked why this is happening in Utah — a state where Black residents make up less than 3% of the population, and home to the world headquarters of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which barred Black members from holding priesthood or entering temples from 1852 to 1978.

Bell, a former White House policy advisor for entrepreneurship and innovation, and his partners and investors point to several reasons, including the state’s strong economy and its growing Black population. But three factors unique to Utah stand out:

• Flexibility in Utah banking law supports Bell’s and King’s ambition for Redemption Bank to eventually be able to serve everyone, nationwide, with a community bank feel and a planned “incredible digital footprint.” Its mobile app is expected to go live next week.

“There is no national Black bank in this country,” King said in an interview, “and so, that’s one of my hopes and dreams.”

• Utah investors were inspired by Bell’s aspirations to expand access to banking as a tool to help people create intergenerational wealth. Prominent Utah business leaders and philanthropists — including foundations connected to the Garff, Miller, Eccles and Huntsman families — raised $30 million for the new bank.

Connecting banking services to people who have had less access “can be transformative,” said Hope Eccles, whose family has been involved in Utah banking for more than a century. “It can be transformative for the individual lives,” she said, “is transformative for their businesses, it’s transformative therefore for their communities.”

Some investors added they were moved by the dramatic drop in the number of Black-owned financial institutions, from more than 100 in the 1960s to two dozen today.

• As Bell’s interest was drawn to Utah, the Spratling family was concerned about the expensive technological challenges ahead for the close-knit Holladay Bank & Trust.

During the pandemic, its loan officers had started work at 5 a.m. to type customers’ Paycheck Protection Program applications into the government portal, rather than taking the time and spending the money to develop its own online process.

“We had countless people say, ‘You saved my business,’” said Traci Flynn, senior lending officer and market president. “No, the PPP loans did, but our ability to do it quickly saved those small businesses.”

[Read more: Here’s how a small Utah bank charmed customers for 50 years — as it becomes the West’s 1st Black-owned bank]

Bell saw the small bank’s success in the program and reached out to its founder, Ronald N. Spratling Jr.

Their shared vision of banking rooted in communities led to this historic first: Black-owned Redemption Holding Co., a Delaware public benefit corporation, acquired the financially healthy, white-owned bank, in an affluent, predominately white Utah neighborhood.

This, King said, “is unheard of.” Black-owned banks are typically located in economically vulnerable communities, aim to serve only those areas, and start from scratch in developing an income stream, said Scott Anderson, former CEO of Zions Bank and now chairman of its advisory board.

Acquiring Holladay Bank, with more than $70 million in assets, “represents what I would call an extraordinary starting point for a Black-owned bank in American history,” he said.

Redemption Bank’s path forward also is unusual, King said, with its goal to serve all communities.

“It’s a radical shift in many respects, that Black excellence, Black innovation, Black ownership, belong everywhere,” she said, “not just in those traditional spaces and zones that we associate Black with.”

[Read more: In Utah, here’s what a new Black-owned bank will offer customers]

On Wednesday, King said she felt “the very presence of legacy all around us,” describing the event as “more than a ribbon cutting.”

“It’s a living testimony that the dream my father envisioned is still alive,” King said, “growing and being fulfilled through bold acts of faith, perseverance, and community.”

The ‘catalytic moment’

During his time in the White House, Bell tried to find alternative ways to help small businesses. He worked with former NFL linebacker and now business advisor Dhani Jones, who at the time had an affiliation with a bank that has a major headquarters in Detroit but is chartered in Utah.

Due to the flexibility allowed by its Utah charter, Bell said, “we saw an opportunity to use this particular bank as a conduit that could provide economic relief to business owners around the country.” The bank became a qualified lender for loans through the federal Small Business Administration, where Bell had previously served as a regional administrator.

That effort “became the catalytic moment” for him and his team, he said. “That was my first time sort of understanding and digging deeper into the Utah banking market and the opportunities it could provide.”

Bell founded Redemption Holding Co. and announced in 2023 that it was acquiring Holladay Bank. In April, the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco approved the plan. In June, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation officially designated the new Redemption Bank — with Bell, King and Jones as co-founders — a “Minority Depository Institution.”

MDI status provides certain business advantages, according to the Federal Reserve. For example, a large bank that invests in or works with an MDI can improve its own performance evaluation under the Community Reinvestment Act — which encourages such partnerships.

Bell eventually wants to take the bank public — selling shares on the stock market — but said for now, it will focus on supporting Utah businesses and entrepreneurs.

A ‘compelling’ case for investors

Redemption Bank promises to be a “21st century community bank,” Eccles said, with a business model that makes it “more resilient to economic ups and downs,” which “was compelling” to her family.

Community and Black banks of the past typically served one geographic area, which could leave them reliant on one or two industries, she explained. When agriculture had a downturn, for example, “it impacted everybody in the town and the banks, their loans, their deposits.”

And the rise of online banking and other innovations “really put the smaller community banks in a squeeze,” she said, “because that technology is expensive and it’s constantly changing, so it’s hard to keep up.”

By investing in technology, Redemption Bank can service customers across a greater geographic area and diverse industries, she said, while also extending banking to underserved communities.

“What attracted us is … that it has the ability to serve people that don’t have the access they need,” Eccles said. “Small businesses … don’t need millions or hundreds of millions of dollars of capital, they need smaller amounts to be able to achieve that family’s dream, to be able to buy that home, to be able to create something that can contribute to their community, to their family, to them individually.”

Investor Richard Durham — founder and chairman of Utah-based private equity firm Aries Capital Partners — lives within walking distance of the former Holladay Bank. That contributed to his interest, he said, but was not what prompted him to back the new bank.

Durham was “shocked” to learn that the number of Black-owned financial institutions has dropped so significantly, he said. His experience as a missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in North Carolina also compelled him.

“I spent a lot of time working in government housing projects in areas where it felt like there was no opportunity to get out of a challenging economic and social cycle” that many African American families faced, Durham said. “So, given my own personal experience … I just said I’m going to invest in this personally. I just feel like it’s such an important thing that is here and I’m excited about what this bank can be.”

Durham hopes that Utahns will support and be proud of the bank. “I think there ought to be a real desire among the people in the state to really show that there’s been a lot of progress in the relationship of the church, the community, the state with these underserved communities,” he said.

King said she finds it “super significant” that many of the bank’s supporters are members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

“Because when you think about, politically what’s happening, the landscape right now, with some of the negative uses of religion in politics, currently that’s hurting and harming people,” she said.

“Now, [with Redemption Bank,] we see an integration with a faith community that is a mostly white faith community, really giving support, investment and respect for a Black leadership, and helping that to grow and expand.”

The hopes for Redemption Bank

Randal Quarles, a former Federal Reserve vice chairman for supervision and regulation, said he felt his family’s investment in Redemption Bank was important because he considers the bank “a symbol of the inclusive prosperity that Utah has always stood for.”

Today, he said, “it’s easier for minorities to get financing from mainstream institutions, but the downside is that there are fewer and fewer minority-owned institutions, where you have the experience and community development that comes from being on the production side of the financing process.”

That expertise is “really important in building a community,” he said, “and is one of the things that we particularly looked at as appealing in the Redemption Bank project.”

Jim Sorenson, chairman of the Sorenson Impact Foundation — which often invests to develop scalable solutions to social problems — said Redemption Bank is the first bank in which the foundation made a direct investment.

“We really want to see how this grows from really what was a little neighborhood bank in Holladay, Utah,” he said, “to where they are benefiting and providing access to capital to really underbanked communities around the country.”

Katharine Garff, chair of Garff Enterprises, has a special connection with Redemption Bank because of her decades-long friendship with Bernice King. She said the Ken Garff company “thrives with small businesses and entrepreneurs and microbusinesses,” and that she hopes Redemption Bank “can promote this economic focus.”

Dinesh Patel, founder and managing director of Patel Family Investment, shares that hope.

“The bigger vision that I saw there was a team that can help small businesses,” he said, “whether it’s minority-owned or women-owned, restaurants and things like that, these small shops are the backbone” of business in Utah.

That idea of financial inclusion also resonated with Anderson, the former president of Zions Bank, Utah’s oldest financial institution.

At Redemption, “there will be a commitment to wealth building, especially among the Black community, there will be financial education and there will be a commitment to financial coaching, and there will be a focus on providing resources for small businesses and providing them access to capital for their future growth,” Anderson said.

“This partnership will really have an impact locally on our economy,” he said, “by creating jobs, by supporting small businesses and entrepreneurs, by encouraging investment and capital flow and by enhancing community development.”

‘Wealth is for everyone’

Redemption Bank also has the support of national investors. Jatali Bellanton, a New York-based financial equity advocate originally from Great Britain, said her investment was prompted by what she describes as “deeply personal” reasons.

“I just really want to help remove this narrative which many people believe that financial stability, asset ownership like owning a home and a car, investing, are out of reach, that they are not for people like them,” Bellanton said.

“When you see this group of people — including me as a Black woman in this space, as an angel investor,” she said, “it shows you that no matter that if you are a woman, if you’re a man, if you’re Black, if you’re Caucasian, if you’re Asian, whatever you are, it shows you that wealth is for everyone.”

Investor Brandon Comer, who created Comer Capital Group in Mississippi in 2008, said he witnessed what happened to the thriving industrial community in his hometown of Gary, Indiana, when it was starved of capital. That experience led to his investment career, he said.

“We can’t tell people to ‘pull themselves up by their bootstraps’ when they have great ideas, when they’ve proven themselves in other situations,” he said, “but then we won’t provide them the capital in order to actually fulfill their dreams.”

Bell and his team also have the support of Ally Financial Inc.— a Utah-based digital financial services company that will serve as a “mentor” bank for Redemption.

Primed for success

At the end of April 2025, Holladay Bank reported over $65 million in assets and almost $53 million in deposits.

Bruce Jensen, Redemption Bank’s CEO, said its assets increased in the last couple of months. “Actually, we added $4 million in new capital,” Jensen said. “With an influx of capital and new loan origination, assets now exceed $70 million.”

Bell said the scores of Utah and national investors willing to work with his team ensure the future success of the bank.

“No other African American-owned bank anywhere, east or west of the Mississippi, has such substantial and successful families and corporations that are willing to invest their time, their talent, their amazing staff,” Bell said. “We are the first to crack the code.”

Mehrsa Baradaran, a graduate of Brigham Young University and the author of “The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap,” said her research shows that Black banks in Black communities faced barriers to their success, as their neighborhoods structurally and historically had less wealth.

“So it’s like the very problem that creates the need for Black banks is also what makes them weaker than other institutions,” Baradaran said.

“Today, in the modern age, there is a way out of that bind ... This bank is open to the entire community and yet it’s important that it is a Black bank because it is owned by Black shareholders and owners, it increases the likelihood that we’re gonna close the racial wealth gap.”

Baradaran added even though she thinks Black-owned banks are not “the answer to closing the wealth gap,” they are a step in the right direction.

“I am very hopeful that [Redemption] will be successful and offer a blueprint for others that may follow,” Baradaran said. “Poverty is a cyclical thing ... the problems are centuries deep and old and any time an institution is formed to remedy that, I think we should all cheer it on and hope for its success and contribute if we can."