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Organizers apply to form bank serving underbanked Hispanic, Latino communities

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Organizers apply to form bank serving underbanked Hispanic, Latino communities

Executives of a small business lender applied with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. to form a bank targeting underbanked immigrant communities.

OUR MicroLending LLC executives applied to form OUR Community Bank, which will provide services to low- and moderate-income communities in Hialeah, Homestead and Miami, Fla., according to the de novo application. The organizers noted that the communities there are predominantly Hispanic and Latino. The bank will serve small businesses, mostly owned by immigrants, seeking loans of between $50,000 and $250,000.

OUR Bank will be headquartered in Hialeah and its proposed holding company is OUR Bancshares. The organizers said Hialeah is ideal because of its demographics and also because no bank is headquartered there and it encompasses designated Opportunity Zones, which provide tax breaks in order to generate community development.

The organizers said a bank such as OUR Bank is needed "particularly in light of the bank consolidation that has taken place in the past 10 years and the disappearance of many community banks from the local market." They noted that the number of community banks in Miami-Dade County declined, compared with 2007, but the county's population has been steadily growing.

The application lists Rafael Saldana, Emilio Santandreu, Omar Alireza, Louis Ferreira, Lydia Fernandez, Francisco Gonzalez and Javier Soto as organizers, board members or management for the de novo. The organizers plan to submit an application for the holding company and the banking unit with the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta.