In the mid-’90s, after getting her Harvard MBA, Teri Williams ’79 was working in marketing as the youngest-ever-hired VP at AmEx when a family friend told her that the Boston Bank of Commerce, founded in 1962 as a haven for Black folks turned away from other banks, desperately needed new management. The news came at a moment when Williams, who’d intended to become a math teacher but fell in love with economics at Brown, had been “looking to use my corporate experience to help the Black community.” So she moved to Boston from New York City and helped take over the bank—taking over three more Black-owned banks, one in Miami and two in L.A., in the coming years. 

In the mid-2000s, she and her partners merged all four banks into OneUnited, taking the new entity into online banking as well. Twenty years later, she says, the business is now worth $700 million and has about 100,000 customers. 

The bank is open to everyone, but 80 percent of its clients are Black, and Williams says it “is really tailored to low- and moderate-income families, maybe who want to rebuild their credit,” she says. To those ends, the bank not only has no fees, it also offers a “Second Chance” checking account for people who’ve been shut out of other banks because of a bad checking history, a secured credit card for rebuilding credit up to $10,000, and a “Cash, Please” short-term loan program with 22 percent interest—to replace loans at check-cashing stores that will garnish from paychecks and set interest as high as 400 percent. Another newish OneUnited feature is an AI tool that, among other things, helps customers make financial decisions (“Why don’t you move that money from your checking to your savings?”) and reminds them when payments are due. “That’s been a big hit for us,” says Williams, adding that a third of customers are using it.

All the bank’s majority owners are Black, says Williams, including herself. Currently, they’re drafting a plan to grow their customer base tenfold in the next five years. She says the bank’s overarching goal is to help close the racial wealth gap in the U.S., which last year [2024] the Federal Reserve said had widened to $240,000 between the median Black and white household. 

Williams also says that she didn’t realize until adulthood how her life’s work had been shaped by her great-grandmother, a woman whom everyone in their segregated Florida town called “Ma Honey” and who owned multiple businesses including a candy store, a juke joint, a barbecue, and several rental units. “I’d follow her around as a kid and didn’t realize until years later that she was a businesswoman,” she says. “The work I do now is meaningful to me because we’re helping to make financial literacy a core value,  particularly in Black communities.”