The odds are against him, but if anyone can build a nationwide bank targeting African-Americans it is probably Robert L. Johnson, the man who founded Black Entertainment Television and later sold it for $3 billion.
Mr. Johnson was the lead investor in a group that bought Metro Bank, an ailing Orlando thrift, earlier this year. He has moved the bank's headquarters to the Maryland suburbs, opened a branch in Washington, D.C., and renamed it Urban Trust Bank.
"We wanted to identify our brand with what would be called the urban market, the urban lifestyle of living, socially, economically, and culturally," Mr. Johnson said in an interview last week.
Most black-owned banks view themselves as local or regional, but Mr. Johnson said he sees "a national charter as a license or an imperative" to open up branches in markets with large concentrations of African-Americans.
The $22 million-asset bank plans additional branches in and around Orlando and Washington, and it aims eventually to expand into Atlanta; Detroit; Jacksonville, Fla.; Philadelphia; and Charlotte and Raleigh, N.C. "If you want to know where we're going to go, you'd trace where there are heavy concentrations of African-American homeowners and African-American consumers," Mr. Johnson said.
The bank is doing a study, he said, to determine whether to expand either organically or by acquiring distressed minority-owned banks, or through some combination of the two.
One possible target could be Independence Federal Savings Bank in Washington. The troubled thrift is on the block, and Mr. Johnson had considered buying it in the past. In the interview Mr. Johnson would not comment on specific acquisition targets.
Metro Bank lost money in each of the last six years, but Dwight L. Bush, Urban Trust's president and chief executive, and Mr. Johnson say they are confident the bank will be consistently profitable within three years.
Opening a branch in Washington was a good start, said William Michael Cunningham, the president and CEO of Minneapolis-based Creative Investment Research, a consulting firm that focuses on minority banking.
He noted that Washington and neighboring Prince George's County, Md., have large numbers of middle- and high-income black residents and therefore boast some of the best demographics in the country for minority banks.
Still, Mr. Johnson and Mr. Bush have their work cut out.
An October report from the Government Accountability Office said that, though minority-owned banks with more than $100 million of assets are nearly as profitable as their mainstream competitors, minority-owned banks under that threshold have fared decidedly worse.
Mr. Johnson said black-owned banks have not been plagued so much by mistakes as by the nature of ownership. "Most African-American banks are owned by the individual founders and investors, and they run it as a family business," he said.
"Because of that, they don't have access to a lot of the growth capital that they need," he said, "and they don't have a lot of access to the capital they need to hire top management. In many cases, management is sort of a family right, so you stop recruiting outside the family circle for the most part."
Capital is not likely to be an issue for Mr. Johnson. Forbes magazine ranks him as the 374th-richest American, with a net worth of about $1 billion.
Mr. Johnson's road to riches began in 1980 when he launched Black Entertainment Television, a channel aimed at black viewers in urban markets. The network steadily grew while offering a combination of music videos and religious programming, and in 2000 Mr. Johnson sold BET to Viacom.
Urban Trust's Washington branch sits in a high-rent district a few blocks from the White House.
Last month President Bush paid the branch a visit. Mr. Johnson said he has a "close friendship" with the president and that the White House asked him to arrange an event at which local entrepreneurs could discuss the economy with Mr. Bush.
The Washington branch's lobby projects a modern feeling, with its circular information desk, flat-panel monitors tuned to Bloomberg News, and three leather chairs in the waiting area. The bank's slogan - "Dreams. Knowledge. Wealth." - is displayed above the tellers' stations.
As minority group members become less distinguishable from whites in spending and saving habits, some have argued, the idea of minority banks is becoming obsolete. But Mr. Johnson said many African-Americans still face significant obstacles to obtaining credit from mainstream banks.
For example, he said, women head 50% of black households in the country and often are their families' sole source of income. For such customers, banks should not base lending decisions solely on credit scores.
"On any given day, if an African-American has to lay out $10,000 to fix the heating system in their house, that's $10,000 they don't necessarily have sitting in a bank account," he said. "And that means somebody's payment doesn't get made on time. And when that happens, all of the sudden, the [credit] score goes out the window."
Even black-owned banks are sometimes reluctant to lend to African-Americans, said Joseph Gladue, an analyst at Cohen Bros. & Co. in Philadelphia. "A lot of minority banks, particularly in the African-American community, have tended to be extremely conservative in their lending practices," he said, "to the point that they don't make many loans."
Urban Trust favors traditional mortgages over alternative or exotic products, such as interest-only loans. "We are not going to actively promote products that are difficult for our clients to understand," said Dwight Bush.
The bank's CEO added that he expects half of its retail clients will be black and a fair number, Latino. Most of his employees are bilingual, he said, and the bank is considering whether to accept Mexican-government-issued matricula consular cards as valid identification.
