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Modernizing Community Lending

The Southern Communities Initiative (SCI), a Sagamore partner, is a consortium of companies united around a single mission: accelerating opportunity and economic growth in six historically underinvested Southern communities — Atlanta, Birmingham, Charlotte, Greater New Orleans, Houston, and Memphis. By strengthening access to capital, expanding business development support, and connecting entrepreneurs with the networks and resources they need to grow, SCI is building the infrastructure for inclusive economies that work for everyone, with an estimated 5x economic return projected over ten years.

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Across SCI’s six communities, the numbers tell a consistent story: in Memphis, 43 percent of Black households are unbanked or underbanked. In Houston, it’s 41 percent. In Birmingham and Charlotte, more than 40 percent. These aren’t communities without access to a bank branch — they’re communities without access to lending institutions built to understand and serve them.

Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs) and Minority Depository Institutions (MDIs) have long served as that backbone, offering favorable terms to low-to-moderate income borrowers that traditional banks often overlook. But many of these institutions operate with outdated core systems, thin technology budgets, and workforce capacity that hasn’t kept pace with demand. The result: capital that could be deployed into minority-owned businesses simply isn’t reaching them at scale.

The Strategy

Systems and technology

Upgrading core banking systems and hardware, training frontline staff, and hiring engineering specialists to support the rollout.

Talent and workforce

Recruiting and training additional lending staff to expand in-house expertise and loan capacity.

Capacity-building and outreach

Adding staff for borrower technical assistance and community outreach to build awareness and pipeline.

SCI’s Access to Capital strategy addresses this head-on. Working in partnership with the National Bankers Association and Appalachian Community Capital, SCI is directing roughly $30 million to help four to five CDFIs and MDIs across its six regions modernize over five years.

The projected result: an additional $330 million in loans deployed annually, reaching roughly 30,000 minority business enterprises across SCI’s footprint. It’s a strategy built on a simple premise — that trusted local institutions, given the right tools and talent, are best positioned to put capital directly into the hands of entrepreneurs who have been waiting far too long for their fair shot.