Jesse Van Tol’s Keynote Speech At The 2024 Just Economy Conference

Below are as-prepared remarks given by National Community Reinvestment Coalition President and CEO Jesse Van Tol on April 3, 2024, at NCRC's Just Economy Conference. This post will be updated to include video as soon as it becomes available.

JESSE VAN TOL, NCRC PRESIDENT & CEO:

I want to tell you three quick stories about persistence, one of NCRC's core values.

When I was 18 years old, I almost died. I was canoe camping with high school friends in the backwoods of the boundary waters - between the US and Canada - and I went for a little walk away from camp, alone. I crossed the peninsula we were on, to the other side.

On the way back, I foolishly took a different route, I got turned around and confused. After almost an hour of walking, I knew I was lost. Unbeknownst to me, I had walked the exact wrong way - I had walked out the one side of the peninsula that had land.

I was exhausted, disoriented, and discombobulated. At one point, I got stuck in a bog. I was becoming dehydrated. I drank dirty swamp water.

And that's when it hit me: my blood sugar was dropping…dangerously low.

You see I am a type 1 diabetic, what used to be called juvenile diabetes. An autoimmune disease, type 1 diabetes destroys your body's ability to produce and regulate insulin. Exercise makes you use insulin more efficiently and sends your blood sugar downward.

Low blood sugar causes weakness, confusion, and the shakes. Get low enough and your body shuts down, no sugar left to burn and no energy left to power essential functions.

Panic set in. With no food, the realization that I was going to die in those woods crept over me. I fell to my knees, weak. My head was in a fog. I wept. I prayed…pleaded for my life, really. I grew despondent. I knew this was it.

When they say your life flashes before your eyes, it's really true. Faint images of life experiences came to me. And then a powerful sense of emotion, a torrent of feelings. I saw my mother…my father… my brothers, my sister, my friends. Not just the moments we had shared, but a sense of loss for the future that wouldn't be coming.

I stood up. I had to live. To do otherwise would leave a hole for family and friends, the promise of a young life wiped out. I mustered every ounce of strength I had, I climbed a tree. I spied a path. I found my way and I walked out of those woods.

I persisted. I had something that was worth fighting for.

Story number two:

In 2016, I stood up on this stage along with John Taylor - our founder, who is here today - and with many of you and announced a ground-breaking Community Benefits Agreement with KeyBank to serve underserved communities.

But after five years of that agreement, we were concerned about their efforts to fulfill the agreement. It became apparent that their lending had gotten worse, not better. We raised concerns about KeyBank's lending in minority and underserved communities and whether it has kept its promise to be a leader in inclusive home mortgage lending.

NCRC published several reports on KeyBank's lending, with special concerns in certain metropolitan areas, including Philadelphia, New York, Hartford, Bridgeport, and New Haven.

It would have been easy to walk away. To throw up our hands. We could have pretended that the CBA had done everything that it was supposed to do, avoided the critique of our own methods. Or we could lean in. [PAUSE] We chose to lean it.

We chose to persist. Because we had something worth fighting for: A better bank and a better community. The opportunity for thousands of people of color to build wealth.

We persisted. And persistence pays off. So I stand before you today to make an announcement, right here at the conference - an agreement to resolve our concerns with KeyBank. And this is a big deal. Today, NCRC and KeyBank are announcing a $25 million agreement to work together to ensure greater levels of investment in minority and underserved communities.

As part of this agreement:

KeyBank will provide $17 million to fund grants, downpayment assistance, fee waivers, product and branch expansion and marketing, designed to expand credit and assist loan applicants in minority and underserved communities. KeyBank and NCRC will be independently responsible for allocating $8.5 million each with meaningful input from the other.

KeyBank will provide $8 million to support NCRC's mission.

KeyBank and NCRC will collaborate on an ongoing basis to continue to improve KeyBank's lending to minority and underserved communities.

Most important of all, we will return to the table to work in good faith to establish a new relationship with KeyBank, with the potential to channel billions of dollars of lending capital into community.

Good friends tell their friends when they've gotten off track. And NCRC is a good friend.

We will always remain open to partnership and collaboration for those who are truly committed to improving, to those who share our goals, our values and our vision for a just economy.

With KeyBank, we persisted. We had something worth fighting for.

Story number three:

Let's turn to the present moment, we have a new challenge.…It's an opportunity to show the financial industry that they cannot undermine economic justice for profit…Not without a fight.

You may have heard that Capital One has proposed to buy Discover.

This is a no terrible, horrible, no good very bad idea. And not just because it would create another too-big-to-fail bank…

…not just because it would undermine competition and raise prices for consumers. It's also a bad idea because Capital One is a bad actor. "Notorious" might be a better word. Because anyone who's been paying attention to how Capital One moves for the past couple decades knows: This is not a company that our communities can rely on.

We saw that when Capital One bought ING Direct, a decade ago. They made a $180 billion ten-year commitment to communities, that wasn't worth the paper it was printed on. It was a commitment to do more of the same, mostly subprime credit card and auto lending. The one part of the commitment that was good - a commitment to mortgage lending - turned out to be false, as Capital One abandoned the mortgage business just a few years later.

NCRC led the charge then galvanized opposition to their merger, generating dozens of negative news stories, hundreds of comments, and protests of their merger at every turn.

We did not entirely win. Their merger got approved.

But we have persisted. Because that's what we do.

Capital One has not changed for the better. Our concerns today were the same as our concerns 10 years ago. Their business model is built around luring low- and moderate-income people into debt that they'll struggle to pay off.

Half of Capital One's profits comes from fees and interest - Which means it comes at the direct expense of people who've been unable to repay what they borrowed.

And Capital One doesn't luck into those revenue streams. It seeks them out - It hunts for them, in the same streets and neighborhoods where we all try to do good work every day.

In the financial press, Capital One is hailed as a leader and an innovator. You know why? Because they've led the charge to use big data to precisely identify the sorts of striving families who could really use a credit limit increase.

They identify those people with numbers and computers, and then they chase after them until they sign them up to a card with a high interest rate and stringent fee structures. That's all bad enough on its own.

But even worse, Capital One has been identified as one of the banks behind the lawsuit to gut the new CRA rule, joining hands with the American Banker's Association and the Chamber of Commerce.

Once again, NCRC has led the opposition.

We immediately detailed to the regulators all the reasons this anticompetitive merger cannot be allowed. We came together with strong national partners to demand public hearings on the merger and other key accountability processes.

That opposition led to coverage by the New York Times, the Washington Post, Associated Press, Reuters, Bloomberg and POLITICO.

We are marshalling you, our members, to make your own voices heard in the public comment process. And we are educating lawmakers about what they can do to ensure that the same mistakes that have been made so often with other megamergers:

- other huge deals that made rich executives and shareholders richer at the expense of the communities you and I fight for -

We've been in these types of battles before. And too often our government failed to heed the warnings of community groups. Too often the pressure on our government to say "yes" to big business has left them saying "oops" to the rest of us when it all blows up in their face.

So now we have to fight that type of fight again.

And this time we can win. Because during that ten years since Capital One was approved to buy ING Direct, we didn't just sit idly by. We were persistent. We worked to change merger policy.

We worked to reinvigorate the public interest standards in banking law. We promoted Community Benefits Agreements, and we have enforced them…insisted they be made real, as our efforts with KeyBank shows.

Because of our persistence, Capital One's deal is on the ropes. And we will continue to fight, because we have something worth fighting for: a banking regulatory system that says no to bad actors, one recognizes the difference between a legitimate community commitment, and a cynical one made just to get merger approval and then torn up afterwards.

As we look to the future, it's easy to be pessimistic. Our enemies conspire against us. People we believed to be friends may fail us. CRA is under attack. 1071 is under attack. DEI and racial equity are under attack. Our people are under attack.

One of our presidential candidates has even warned of a bloodbath if he doesn't win. And I for one believe him. We are in a fight for our lives. A fight for our nation. A fight…for a future worth fighting for

And some days it may feel as though we're lost in the woods. Headed in the wrong direction. Some days it may feel as though we've lost all energy to go on.

And that's how life can feel for a non-profit leader, of an advocate, of a change maker, for many of us. Like rolling a rock up a hill. Like an endless walk in the woods. Like we might not get to the mountaintop, not now…not ever.

But remember: it doesn't matter how many times we get knocked down, it's only how many times we get up that matters.

And remember: We have something that's worth fighting for.

I close here today with a message. To the American Bankers Association. To the Chamber of Commerce. To Capital One.

To any bank that thinks it can pretend to be about racial equity, and then not be about racial equity. To anybody who would turn their backs on serving the community.

We represent the community.

You mess with us: you know we got it!

Mess with us: you know we got it.

Mess with us: you know we got it.

Now to some people that probably sounds like a threat. It's not a threat, it's a warning…It's a warning. Be careful of us. On that, we must insist.

We will persist. We will continue. We will stand up and walk out of these woods.

Because. We have something that's worth fighting for.

Repeat. We. Have. Something. Worth fighting for.

Thank you!

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