WASHINGTON—The Alliance for Innovative Regulation (AIR) has announced a partnership with Visa to support AIR’s Minority Depository Institution (MDI) Digital Modernization Pilot program, which is designed to provide underserved communities of color with more competitive financial services options.
Inclusiv, which serves many MDIs within credit unions, has expressed support for the initiative.
“MDIs uniquely understand the challenges facing this historically disenfranchised and marginalized population, and serve as a trusted home for services,” AIR said. “The program elicits MDIs’ feedback about their technology goals, assesses the state of their digital offerings and establishes a path to implementing digital solutions that will improve their competitiveness and benefit their customers.”
‘Precious Resource’
The organization added that Visa’s partnership will enable collaboration directly with banks and credit unions, building upon the MDI modernization work that AIR started with the National Bankers Association in December 2020.
“MDIs are a precious resource to the communities they serve and they are under threat. Digital capabilities will define the competitive environment for financial services over the next decade,” said David Ehrich, AIR’s executive director and co-founder. “AIR is proud to partner with Visa, minority banks represented by the National Bankers Association and minority-backed credit unions to bridge this digital divide.”
AIR described MDIs are a “primary node in efforts by the financial ecosystem to address the racial wealth gap for people of color,” adding that digital modernization is necessary to scale up their special capacity to serve communities of color with a broad range of affordable and easy-to-use financial services solutions.
Support from Inclusiv
“Inclusiv supports strategies for digital modernization in MDI credit union and cooperative networks,” said CEO Cathie Mahon. “By leveraging technology and data, Inclusiv has been working to increase financial inclusion and independence in low-income communities. We are excited by the opportunities in AIR’s pilot program to produce shared-utility tech products that could potentially benefit our network and the communities that need access to credit and banking services the most.”
According to AIR, the pilot will include a test group of MDIs — including banks, credit unions and community development financial institutions (CDFIs) — that AIR will partner with to define and execute a digital modernization roadmap. The goal is to improve their competitiveness by identifying and implementing digital solutions for both their client-side services and internal operations.
The project aims to establish a “test and learn” collaboration, with the results shared publicly to inspire MDIs across the ecosystem to modernize their digital infrastructure, AIR said.
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