The Cities for Financial Empowerment Fund has partnered with the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis to create the Bank On National Data (BOND) Hub, a platform for financial institution with Bank On certified accounts to share data on account openings, account usage and consistency, online access, and more.
Why participate?
Consistent, national metrics, quantifying the success of the Bank On movement and the vibrancy of your Bank On certified accounts are critical in continuing the momentum and availability of safe and affordable banking products. Reporting data confidentially once a year to the BOND Hub, as opposed to on an ad hoc basis throughout the year to local Bank On coalitions or other interested stakeholders, provides your financial institution with a one-shot, secure, and simple way to report relevant aggregate data. In addition, participation in the BOND Hub is a powerful way for the financial services industry to tell the story of how it is stepping up to meet the needs of unbanked consumers. Finally, federal regulators have explicitly highlighted BOND Hub data as helpful for Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) examinations.
Who is eligible to participate?
Any financial institution with a Bank On certified account is eligible to report their account data to the BOND Hub. Even if the account wasn’t available during the entire year, as long as the account was available and active at some point during the reporting calendar year, financial institutions can report data to the St. Louis Fed.
What is the reporting process?
Financial institutions submit data once a year, directly and completely confidentially to the St. Louis Fed. The St. Louis Fed and the CFE Fund both can provide technical support on how to pull the data and maximize the results.
Will my financial institution’s data be identifiable?
No. The St. Louis Fed alone sees your individual institutional data and then aggregates that data with that of other financial institutions. Further, aggregate data is only made public at the ZIP code level if three or more of the participating financial institutions have reported data within that ZIP code.