Bank cofounded by Bernice King launches debit card to help low-income mothers

“Guaranteed income, what we’ve seen time and time again, has been a jolt out of poverty,” he said.

Credit: AP Photo/Paul Holston

Credit: AP Photo/Paul Holston

The debit card was launched on Juneteenth, which is also the one-year anniversary of finalizing the historic acquisition by a group of investors led by Bell and King of Utah-based Holladay Bank & Trust, making it the first Black-owned bank in the Western U.S. They renamed the institution Redemption Bank and serve clients nationwide.

The name of the debit card came from a conversation about two years ago between Bell, King and singer and actor Tyrese Gibson.

Gibson came up with the idea of linking the words “bank” and “king” — a play on the word “banking” which incorporated Bernice King’s famous last name, Bell said.

Credit: Redemption Bank via AP

Credit: Redemption Bank via AP

Redemption Bank is a relatively small institution, with $71.6 million in assets at the end of March, according to Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. records. But Bell said he felt it can “lead into this new race to end poverty.”

For every Bank King Card account opened, a portion of the proceeds will be donated to the bank’s Redemption Foundation.

Organizations that provide a guaranteed basic income to mothers living in government housing will receive grants from the foundation. The size of those grants has not been decided yet, Bell said, but he said he expects donations to start by the end of the year.

One of the future beneficiaries from the program will be the Georgia Resilience and Opportunity (GRO) Fund, which has been running the In Her Hands initiative, a no-strings-attached guaranteed income program for Georgia mothers, since 2021.

“What we heard from communities is that oftentimes there can be resources available, but there’s oftentimes a mismatch between those resources and what people actually need,” said Hope Wollensack, founding executive director of the GRO Fund.

Credit: In Her Hands

Credit: In Her Hands

“And so cash really provides the flexibility and trust in individuals that they know best what they need and that they’re the experts in their lives,” she said.

The initiative was inspired by one of Martin Luther King Jr.’s speeches, “Where Do We Go From Here?,” in which he says: “The dignity of the individual will flourish when the decisions concerning his life are in his own hands, when he has the assurance that his income is stable and certain.”

“Since we serve women, mostly moms, our program is named In Her Hands, both representing sort of like the agency and autonomy in the women’s hands, but also the cash in people’s hands,” Wollensack said.

Over the past five years, the program has given a little over $20 million to about 1,000 women in Georgia. Wollensack said she feels that being a part of the Bank King Card initiative is a full-circle moment now connected with the King family legacy.

“This partnership means that we’re able to serve more women in Georgia who really could use the funds and are really using this as a springboard for what’s next for them,” she said.

For Redemption Bank, the hope is for foundations, corporations and some of the bank’s investors to financially match the institution’s grants to expand its impact, Bell said.

“We want others to join us in this, and so the more people who obviously use their Bank King Card, the more resources we’ll have. But we don’t want that to be the limit,” Bell said.

“We want to be able to go to aligned organizations who feel as we do, that this is the way to truly transform communities and create opportunities for generations.”