On Our Radar

The Southern Poverty Law Center fired Morris Dees, the nonprofit civil rights organization’s co-founder and former chief litigator.SPLC President Richard Cohen said in a statement Dees’ dismissal over his misconduct was effective on Wednesday, March 13. When pressed for details on what led to the termination, the organization declined to elaborate.

JPMorgan Chase & Co is making intentional efforts to service low-income communities by creating a new type of checkless account that does not allow overdrafts, requires no minimum balance, and offers free check cashing.

Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. chairman Jelena McWilliams tells a compelling story about her negative encounters with the U.S. financial system and vows to make substantive changes to the Community Reinvestment Act that benefit communities she has called home and others alike.

Tanitoluwa Adewumi is an 8-year-old Nigerian refugee and a chess prodigy. He began playing a little over a year ago and now has achieved a chess rating of 1587, highest being a 2845, while living in a homeless shelter in New York City.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., dropped a requirement that credit unions face Community Reinvestment Act obligations from a revamped affordable housing bill introduced on Wednesday.

Homeownership rates rose dramatically from 2016 through 2018 while renting rates had slowly declined within that same time frame.

Professor Chris Mayer has a lesson for ­homeowners: Reverse mortgages, which let older Americans tap their home equity without selling or moving, aren’t as risky as some say.

Rep. Katie Porter, D-CA, pulls out her self-authored textbook and a calculator during a House Financial Services Committee hearing because CFPB Director Kathy Kraninger did not give the definition of ‘annual percentage rate’ (APR) that was sufficient for Porter. Porter also gave Kraninger a practice problem where the director was asked to find the APR. The director would not, or could not, answer the question.

White Americans contribute largely to air pollution but Black and Hispanic Americans are the ones primarily exposed to, and inhale more of, the polluted air.

JPMorgan Chase & Company announced that it will stop financing private operators of prisons and detention centers, possibly as a response to Trump’s administration increasing its attempts to detain undocumented migrants in privately run prisons or due to public pressure to do so.

After twelve years spent investing in impact-oriented financial services startups around the globe, the Omidyar Network, which serves as the family investment office for eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, is spinning off its financial inclusion investment arm as Flourish Ventures.

Black-majority cities are rising amid a national conversation surrounding whether they can improve and develop while retaining their black majority.

Equifax announced a data breach that resulted in over 150 million people’s information being stolen. Credit bureaus play a vital role in lending decisions and the financial services industry will not sit idle in the midst of the privacy debates.

Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson said he will leave office at the end of President Donald Trump’s first term, saying he could have a greater impact in the private sector.

Nationally, banks have shut 1,915 more branches in lower-income neighborhoods than they’ve opened in the four years through 2018, according to S&P Global Inc. The three largest consumer banks — JPMorgan, Wells Fargo and Bank of America — led the way, S&P said.