Alex D. Fennoy was promoted to executive vice president of Midwest BankCentre, where he continues to lead the bank’s community and economic development lending, investment, financial education and volunteerism.
In addition to traditional, middle-market commercial banking, Fennoy – who is based at the bank’s Lemay headquarters, 2191 Lemay Ferry Rd. – leads the bank’s delivery of full-service banking products and services to meet local credit needs. By cultivating partnerships with such local organizations as Beyond Housing, Mount Beulah Missionary Baptist Church, the City of Pagedale, Friendly Temple Missionary Baptist Church and others, he has spearheaded the bank’s expansion into serving previously underbanked communities.
“Access to banks and mortgage loans is an undeniable marker of community vitality,” Fennoy wrote in a column for The American on August 4. “When banks fail to make loans in low- and moderate-income neighborhoods or in areas populated mostly by minorities, working people have a hard time building wealth, and neighborhoods lose the stability that widespread home ownership brings.”
According to a recent study by the National Community Reinvestment Coalition on mortgage originations from 2012-2014 in three Midwestern cities, African Americans make up 18 percent of the metro St. Louis population, but only four percent of all home purchase loans here were made to African Americans in that span.
In the same 2012-2014 period, under Fennoy’s leadership (as approved by Midwest BankCentre Chairman and CEO Jim Watson), Midwest BankCentre approved nearly 80 percent of all home purchase applications and nearly 70 percent of all home refinancing applications from majority-African-American census tracts in St. Louis city and county.
Including home improvement loans, the bank’s total mortgage loan applications in that span totaled 677. That was a dramatic change from 2009-11, when the bank took fewer than 65 applications in those same census tracts.
“We made a sober decision to embark on changing past patterns in ways that were sustainable and would jointly help our local community, our customers, our employees and our shareholders,” Fennoy wrote – while fully acknowledge that the impetus for this action was discussions with federal regulators and ultimate agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) beginning in 2011.
However, he wrote, “our DOJ agreement became the beginning, not the end, of our story about the catalytic power of banking upon local communities.”
Midwest BankCentre opened a new full-service bank in 2012 in Pagedale, a community never before served by a bank, in collaboration with Beyond Housing. In Pagedale, members of the bank’s 24:1 Community Advisory Board help develop unique financial solutions tailored to a traditionally underserved region.
Next the bank will open a new full-service branch in partnership with Friendly Temple Missionary Baptist Church in the 5500 block of Dr. Martin Luther King Drive.
“In banking, we expect a retail branch to show profits in five years,” Fennoy said at the April 27 groundbreaking. “That branch in Pagedale showed profit in less than three years. So we wanted to be somewhere else in North City to replicate that process.”
After developing a series of interior design enhancements, construction of the new Midwest BankCentre branch at Friendly Temple began in early October. Friendly Temple is serving as the general contractor. The majority of subcontractors are minority-owned, Fennoy said. Weather permitting, construction will be completed in late 2016.
“The bank’s six-person team has been hired, and the staff includes a member of Friendly Temple. All are currently on board, working in other Midwest BankCentre locations until our Friendly Temple branch opens,” Fennoy said. “Pastor Michael Jones has joined the bank’s legal board of directors. The church and several church members have already opened accounts, and several have been extended loans with us.”
He said a new St. Louis City Advisory Board, modeled on the bank’s 24:1 board, will be invaluable to helping spur economic success and business reinvestment in St. Louis.
Fennoy possesses nearly 25 years of commercial banking experience. He joined Midwest BankCentre in 2010, focusing his efforts on helping local unbanked and underbanked citizens. He has co-chaired the St. Louis Unbanked Tax Force and its Bank On Save Up initiatives since 2013.
Fennoy serves on the boards of Better Family Life, Northside Community Housing, the Metro St. Louis Coalition for Inclusion & Equity, the Center for the Acceleration of African-American Business and the Jackie Joyner-Kersee Foundation, for which he serves as board president. A native of East St. Louis who currently lives in Swansea, Illinois, he earned a bachelor’s degree in accounting from Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee
