Community bankers tend to lean to the right, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have fans on the left.
The Huffington Post, a popular liberal Web site, is urging ordinary Americans to move their deposits out of large banks and into small, local banks that, as writers Arianna Huffington and Rob Johnson put it, largely “avoided the banquet of greed and corruption that created the toxic economic swamp we are still fighting to get ourselves out of.”
Aside from a blog post proposing that people resolve to ditch big banks in the New Year, the Huffington Post is getting its message out through a YouTube video (featuring the inevitable “It’s a Wonderful Life” clips) and a Web site on which consumers can find a roster of the healthiest community banks in their area simply by typing in their Zip code.
The camaign is going viral. The column had attracted nearly 5,000 comments as of Monday morning, many of them from readers who already used community banks or credit unions or said they planned to transfer their funds to one.
Institional Risk Analytics, which provided the technology enablement, said in its email newsletter that it had logged more than a quarter of a million search inquiries in the first 48 hours of the campaign, which it dubbed a "noble effort to send a message to the Banksters."
However, it’s clear from reaction to the campaign that some consumers aren’t necessarily enamored with small banks, either. One commenter on Gawker.com (which ran a story calling the Huffington Post campaign “lame,”) said community banks’ online banking “sucks,” while another suggested that consumers would be better off stuffing their money under a mattress before moving it to a local bank “whose shares are trading for a dollar each and who gets a cease-and-desist order from the Feds.”
Still, it’s hard to imagine a community banker not appreciating the endorsement of a Web site that has an estimated 9 million unique users each month and is among the most linked-to sites on the Internet. Even if they don’t agree with its politics.
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Alan Kline is editor in chief of US Banker.
