SDNY COURTHOUSE, August 25 – Valley
National Bancorp has announced it will apply to acquire
Providence Bank & Trust, a South Holland,
Illinois-based bank with roughly $1.6 billion in assets
and 15 branches across greater Chicago and Northwest
Indiana.
Valley National is a large, multi-state
institution; Providence, the target, sits in the size
range the OCC and FDIC's proposed Community Reinvestment
Act rule would most directly affect.
Providence's most recent CRA Performance
Evaluation, conducted by the FDIC and dated May 15, 2023,
includes two findings examiners described in their own
words as falling well short of what the surrounding
community actually needs: On small business lending,
examiners found: "The bank's performance significantly
trailed the demographic." Only 46.8 percent of
Providence's small business loans went to businesses with
annual revenues of $1 million or less — even though such
businesses make up 89.8 percent of all businesses in the
bank's own assessment area.
Consider the already disparate
mortgage lending records of Valley National Bank. Looking
at New York, where it was allowed to buy the Westchester
Bank, in 2025 VNB made 320 mortgage loans to whites - and
only thirty to African Americans. Its record is disparate
elsewhere also, as Fair Finance Watch will show.
On home mortgage lending to low-income
borrowers, the finding was the same, stated twice: "The
bank's performance to low-income borrowers trailed
aggregate data and significantly trailed the demographic."
Providence made just 9 loans to low-income borrowers out
of 332 total — 2.7 percent — in an assessment area where
low-income families make up 24.3 percent of all families,
and even trailing the 5.7 percent rate achieved by all
lenders combined in the same market.
This is the type of
performance that would fall into the CRA deregulation
zone. So Fair Finance Watch will keep commenting to the
regulations, and Inner City Press will file FOIAs, even as
it purposes its FOIA lawsuit against the Fed in SDNY. More
mergers, more CRA Performance Evaluations, and more of
what full examination currently catches, to follow as
they're announced. Watch this site.
