Cityside Financial Services Review

Cityside Financial Services Review

After reading that case study, The Bank closed and was put for sale in the 1970s because middle-class families moved in the neighborhood. The bank opened back up under a racially diverse group of investors including a young black investment banker named Ron Wilkins. (Ely 2006) Trying to rebuild the community, the team developed a strategy for local clients to reinvest deposit accounts into the neighborhood bank and for wealthy clients to invent in markets accounts, IRAs and CDs.

The two units were created in the Sales Division: External Deposits, which provided service to the wealthy clients and Retail Operations, that only serviced the local community.   With the neighborhood once being predominantly white and now the neighborhood is mostly black Cityside thought it would beneficiary to for the bank to hire mostly African-American employee on the Retail Operations department side to assist the blacks. In the External Deposit department, there were mostly white, middle-class college graduates hired to assist the wealthy whites with the higher investor accounts. Because the majority of the retail account holders were black women, they hired mostly black women employees from the community.  

I believe that, their perception of hiring blacks to service blacks, is thinking that they not intelligent enough to comprehend.  Not all the Cityside Bank employees thought like me, Thomas agreed with Sue McMillen, the white head of External Deposits stating that all whites running a middle class were create issues and questions from the community causing the bank to be threatened. Thomas, the black head of Retail Operations thought that having people of the same race communicate and relate to the customers will may them more comfortable.

With having the two departments, it left the employees feeling that one group was superior over the other group.   Being that Retail area is mostly African-American, I can see were the tension may...