Oneunited Bank
“Can a mission-driven Black-owned community bank use embedded finance partnerships to close the racial wealth gap at scale without sacrificing its CDFI identity?”
Founded in 1996 by Kevin Cohee and Teri Williams Cohee, OneUnited Bank established itself as the largest Black-owned bank and the first Black-owned internet bank in the United States. The bank's core mission has consistently centered on closing the racial wealth gap for African-American communities. Rather than building all products in-house, the bank has embraced third-party embedded finance partnerships — most notably with Lendistry for small business lending and MX for data aggregation — to extend its product set beyond traditional deposit banking without the overhead of proprietary fintech infrastructure.