LOS ANGELES – Rep. Maxine Waters held a town hall meeting on Saturday where she pointedly asked executives from City National Bank, PNC Financial Services and Wells Fargo & Co., if they would each open a branch in her district. She said she wanted to hold the banks accountable for promises made in recent merger agreements or consent orders.
The town hall meeting at Inglewood High School got fiery at times as Waters pressed the three bank executives to answer questions from constituents in her 43rd congressional district in South Los Angeles. Waters, the ranking member of the House Financial Services Committee, said she invited all the top banks to attend but was turned down by Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and U.S. Bancorp.
Next week, the Senate Banking Committee plans to hold an annual oversight hearing with executives from the nation's top banks. Waters said she was disappointed that Republicans in the House would not hold a similar hearing. Her town hall, she said, would try to fill in the gap.
When Jeffrey Martinez, executive vice president and head of branch banking at PNC Bank, described how the Pittsburgh bank was upholding its pledge to invest an eye-popping
"When are you going to open up a branch in my district?" Waters said. "We have a problem with branch banking not being available to us in all of our communities in the way they should be. We call them banking deserts."
Martinez responded: "That's a great question, it's an important one and one of the things we've slated even though we're new to California."
"We would like to help you find a location," Waters said, to thunderous applause and laughter from the crowd of about 300. "I'm so looking forward to establishing" a branch here, she added.
Waters then described how City National Bank in Los Angeles had agreed in January to pay
"Can you discuss where you might be opening the branch?" Waters asked. "Where are you with all of this?"
David Cameron, City National's executive vice president of personal and business banking responded, "That is a great question," drawing laughter from the audience.
"I don't have any announcement on where we're going to put that branch."
To which Waters replied: "Oh, we'll help you," to further applause from the audience.
City National plans "to go above and beyond," the agreement to invest at least $29.5 million in a loan subsidy fund for residents of majority-Black and Hispanic neighborhoods in Los Angeles County, Cameron said. The bank has hired more than 20 loan officers to support the initiative to provide grants of up to $15,000 each to first-time homebuyers.
Waters also questioned why City National did not have a mortgage loan officer at a local branch on Crenshaw Boulevard in Los Angeles.
"You've done well at that branch, are you going to expand that branch and put a loan officer there?" Waters said. "Can you do these things?"
Waters skillfully thanked each of the bankers for showing up to the town hall meeting, while also hitting them hard on consent orders.
"I really thank you for coming today. I know that you know we have a lot of questions for you, based on the fines that you received and all of that," she told Cameron, and then asked the audience to give him a round of applause.
She also asked Colleen Canny, Wells Fargo's executive vice president and national head of branch banking, why the San Francisco bank
"First tell us, why did you close those branches?" Waters asked.
Canny said that customer transactions through branches have fallen 50% over the past three years as more banking is done online, through mobile apps or ATMs.
"We still think branches are important and we continue to look at our branch footprint to ensure we have the proper coverage," Canny said.
Waters lamented that banks are closing branches in inner cities where seniors who may not necessarily use a cell phone to bank still prefer to go to a branch in person.
"I want to tell you something that is a cultural discovery for everybody," Waters told the bankers and the audience. "We like to go to a teller as we put our money across the counter. We like this kind of interaction with the people that we do service with and this is the kind of cultural consideration that the bank should take into account."
At the town hall, which lasted for four hours, constituents asked a wide range of questions including why there were long lines at their local branches and why they were not able to get small business loans or even speak directly to the same banker on each visit. CFPB Director Rohit Chopra, who spoke after the bankers, answered a range of questions on reverse mortgages, digital redlining and junk fees.
Waters also lambasted the banking industry generally for Republican-led efforts in the House, which voted on Friday to nullify
The head organizer for Rise Economy, the consumer group formerly known as the California Community Reinvestment Coalition, asked the bankers generally why they did not support the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
"Your industry trade groups are attacking the CFPB, they're attacking fundamental consumer protections … and very basic data on small business lending that we fought hard for for nearly 10 years," said Jyotswaroop Kaur Bawa, chief of organizing and campaigns at Rise Economy. "We want you to tell us specifically how many Black and Hispanic-owned businesses you make loans to and at what rate—that's what the fight is about."
Republicans and a handful of Democrats in the House and Senate, which already had passed an identical bill, say the data-collection rule would be too onerous for lenders and small-business borrowers. President Biden is expected to veto the legislation.
The small-business lending rule is expected to be used by the CFPB to identify discrimination, though the bureau exempted more than 2,000 community banks and small businesses from the rule. The coalition sued the CFPB in 2019 for taking so long to issue the rule, which Dodd-Frank's Section 1071 mandated.
The 1071 rule was about wealth-building and closing the wealth gap, Waters said.
"The Senate Republicans put up a great fight against getting the rule, the data that we needed to determine why we can't get small business loans — they fought us very hard, and they said they represented the banks," Waters said. "Republicans won on trying to kill that rule that would give us information that would show that Blacks, Latinos, women and LGBTQ would not be getting small business [loans.]"
Water did commend one bank: First Citizens BancShares, which acquired the failed Silicon Valley Bank and last month announced an agreement to invest more than
Waters characteristically played to the audience by rattling off the various programs created after the pandemic including loans that banks delivered via the Paycheck Protection Program.
"You're wondering, if there's all this money around, why haven't we been able to get some of it," Waters said.
