The U.S. Department of Justice and the state of North Carolina have reached a settlement with a major U.S. bank to resolve allegations that the lender discriminated against its community for years.
In a press release, the Department of Justice said First National Bank of Pennsylvania (FNB) has redesigned predominantly Black and Hispanic neighborhoods in Charlotte and Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
Redlining occurs when services – usually financial in nature – are denied to certain areas based on race or ethnicity.
The complaint against FNB alleges that the bank failed to provide mortgage services to predominantly Black and Latinx communities between 2017 and 2021. the FNB rate.
FNB, which oversees $45 billion in assets, had its offices in predominantly white neighborhoods and had closed its branch in Winston-Salem — a predominantly Black area — in 2021.
It is also alleged that FNB employed mortgage brokers who worked in predominantly white neighborhoods and did not track how they developed their loan referrals or how they distributed marketing materials.
Says Attorney General Merrick B. Garland:
“Lending discrimination is against the law and harms communities and entire families for generations. Today’s settlement invests $13.5 million to expand access to credit services for Black and Hispanic neighborhoods in Charlotte and Winston-Salem that have been denied them for too long.
With this settlement, the Department of Justice’s Combating Redlining Initiative has now secured more than $122 million in relief for communities across the country. But we recognize how much work we still have to do, and we are not giving up in our efforts to combat discrimination in lending wherever it occurs.”
The DOJ’s Combating Redlining Initiative was announced in 2021 and was described as the Department’s “most aggressive and coordinated enforcement effort to address redlining.”
FNB has more than $45 billion in assets and is one of the 100 largest banks in the U.S., with approximately 350 branches in the District of Columbia, Maryland, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia.
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