This Week in ESG and Impact Investing

According to the FDIC National Survey of Unbanked and Underbanked Households , released on December 2, 2009, 21.7% of Black households, 19.3% of Hispanic households and 15.6% of Native American households are underbanked.."at least 25.6 percent of U.S. households, close to 30 million households with about 60 million adults, are unbanked or underbanked," a very large potential market. Competition is supposed to fill a market need, in this case defined as an underserved customer, so not only are these statistics surprising, but they raise questions about the justification for and very existence of an underserved market. They also raise questions concerning the efficiency of the FDIC's Advisory Committee on Economic Inclusion. "Freakonomics" style economic analysis will quickly be offered to explain this gap, but will miss the true reason behind the statistics. While we applaud the release of the data , it clearly shows the Committee is ineffective, to say the lea