As last recorded, the median wealth for a white family and the median wealth for a Black family, a 10x different, over 150 years. I think, first, we have to ask ourselves. Well, wealth is all of your assets, minus all of your liabilities. Assets are things like your car, your checking account, your investments, your business. Well, that gap, that 10x gap, is partially because, for many years, decades in fact. Black Americans and didn't really have access to it. Well, why are we talking about this now? Well, in 2020, in the midst of inequities are really laid bare across nearly every system, health care, education, and people were moved in meetings at work. And I, as a consultant, started that I thought I would never have. I guess the question: how do we make sure that, in this moment, that starts to close that wealth gap? So who am I? My name is Kedra Newsom Reeves. I am a consultant. Hedge funds, asset managers. But before any of that, I am a Black American. And when we talk about the wealth gap, it's really important. So I thought I'd tell a little story and how policy intersects with wealth. So we'll start with. He was a man named Silas Newsom, and Silas was born a slave on Newsom Station, where he and his family. He didn't own anything. He didn't own his home. He didn't really even own his own body, his own labor, his children. Any of those things, all of those things, were here to create wealth. So we believe that he was a servant during the Civil War who was actually fighting. So he really had no wealth. Well, at the end of slavery, there was a question: what do we do for now that we are ending slavery? And there was a choice. We could make a settlement or we could make a settlement. Well, the slaves had no power, and the country had to be united. So the federal government decided essentially giving them money at the end of the war. And not their physical property, the slaves that had provided. So Silas, at the end of the Civil War, had no wealth. He was free but had no wealth. He became a sharecropper. My great-grandfather Silas was born a number of years. He was drafted to serve in World War I along with 350,000 in segregated units. He served in the war. When he came back to the United States at the end of the war, the economy was compressing. And Black people could not get land. They really could not acquire any credit, so he also became a farmer. And he had a son, also named Silas -- there are a lot of Silases in my family -- my grandfather. My grandfather Silas was also a soldier. After World War II, the US Federal Government which provided support for veterans. And the bill provided student loans and, most importantly for wealth-building. In the years following the war, the GI Bill accounted for to nine million veterans. But Black veterans. So Silas, my grandfather, and he married my grandmother. Yes, my grandmother's name was Cinderella. And they had eight children. But they never bought a home. And the highlight of their housing journey was moving into with their children and paying rent for that housing project, which in terms of the quality of housing but did not allow them to build wealth. My father, another soldier, a 20-year veteran, bought his first home in his early 50s. But it took four generations and begin to build ownership. That's one family's story. That happened between redlining, housing discrimination, the really important role in building Black communities, the Savings and Loan Crisis of the 1980s, which crushed a lot of Black banks, and the subprime crisis in 2008, which stripped a lot of Black. There's a lot of history there, but that story tells you a bit where we are today. Now, certainly, as we think it is critical for the Federal Government. That said, financial institutions in providing access to credit, to build communities and allow Black communities to thrive. We have to be clear: managing 17,000 dollars better. Better education does not get us there. Access to credit and capital are critical. So I want to talk that financial institutions can contribute. Number one is getting getting more people banked. We know today that are un- or underbanked. Unbanked means that. Underbanked means but you use alternative services or paying bills. And that's not just expensive in terms of the fees that you pay. It's also expensive in terms of the time. Think about how you pay. It probably comes. You don't even think about it. You set it up in advance. Well, if you're unbanked, you are probably going physically, a piece of paper. You then travel to City Hall or your DMV to pay that bill. About 40 percent of people say they are unbanked because they think to really maintain a checking account. Well, that's just not true. In the last several years, credit unions, community banks have created low-cost, no-minimum specifically made for this population. So we have an issue with awareness. Banks, community partners and others have to work together to increase in communities that need them, so that we can start to reduce who are un- and underbanked and get them on the ladder. The challenge is about 28 percent are credit-invisible, which means that you have. And the way that credit works is to say, if you can prove that you have paid credit back then I can lend you more credit. It's kind of a chicken. The interesting thing is that banks have really innovated in recent years. cable bills, utility bills, rent payments, etc. -- to show that you're able. The additional challenge on this one, which was more about awareness, is that you need to have. You need to prove to regulators that you are able to lend credit to marginalized groups. What we need to see is, and the banking industry, to come together to start to use alternative data. Well, what about communities? Without community wealth, individual wealth, in a way. And if you go into most to most communities of color, what you'll find. For every economic crisis. For every economic boom. And so what we're seeing, and I'll use Chicago as an example, is the partnerships occurring between banking institutions, philanthropists, the city and community leaders to invest hundreds of millions of dollars to build community resources and communities that have. Lastly, we've got to talk about business, and not just small businesses. Now, when you have individual stability and you have access to credit, those are all fantastic things. Take all of the new tech companies, and I say "new" because now but take Facebook, Google, Amazon. At some point, all of those companies with one employee or a few employees that were building a technology. What those companies received early on was venture capital money. And when you look only one percent of venture capital funds. So if Black entrepreneurs they're not able to grow, and the only way for that to change is from within the industry itself. In this generation, we must not only in Black communities. We must also be talking and founded businesses going public. Those are just four solutions. There's many other things to close the wealth gap. This gap is not new. It was born and perpetuated and business practice over time, and all of those things need to change to start to close the gap. Financial institutions at the individual level, and at the business level. It's important to our families, and it's important to our economy. Instead of talking about let's begin to close the gap now. Thank you.