BANKING ON THE DELTA

Under Darrin Williams, Southern Bancorp is pitching traditional banking to people whose first choice is usually a payday lender

- Jeff Green and Peter Robison

Darrin Williams thinks it was probably a Fox News interview he did in early April that caught the eye of the White House and got him invited later that month to a videoconference with President Trump, his daughter Ivanka, and other top advisers. The pandemic was raging, and Trump had convened a lineup of financial luminaries to discuss how to save the economy. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin took notes as Brian Moynihan, chief executive officer of Bank of America Corp., and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. CEO David Solomon opened the conversation. Then came Williams, who runs Southern Bancorp Inc. in Little Rock.

Williams is one of only a handful of Black CEOs at financial institutions with more than $1 billion in assets. At $1.6 billion, Southern Bancorp is a minnow next to the trillion-dollar-size whales that more commonly have access to Trump. But in this conversation, just four days after the federal government rolled out the Paycheck Protection Program to provide $350 billion in loans to keep small businesses alive, the little bank in Arkansas emerged as the most relevant.

Business owners at the time were complaining that many banks couldn’t even accept their loan applications, let alone write them a check. Moynihan and Solomon told Trump the best way to get money quickly to the people who needed it most was to use a network of small lenders known as community development financial institutions, or CDFIs, modeled after Southern Bancorp. Williams had worked through the previous weekend to help review loans and send out 50 checks to customers in the Mississippi Delta. “These communities are hurting,” he told Trump, urging the administration to rely more on CDFIs.