America’s largest Black-owned bank says it’s going all in on AI.
OneUnited Bank, which serves more than 100,000 customers nationwide, has launched WiseOne, an AI-powered money management tool that helps users make financial decisions in hopes of fostering generational wealth. The app is at users’ fingertips via mobile or online, and gives custom insights into their spending, saving, and progress.
“We use GPS and it takes us where we want to go. That’s what this is like,” says Terri Williams, President and COO of OneUnited in an interview with TheGrio. “You want to save more? Here’s some tools, here’s some direction… So the idea of it is to use AI for good, to help our community build wealth and become more financially literate.”
AI is revolutionizing the banking industry overall. Multiple big banks and corporations, from Goldman Sachs to Citigroup, have all unveiled AI-driven tools to advance their business. But Williams says the potential for AI’s impact on advising Black communities on financial wellness is massive, given the realities of the wealth gap in America– a gap she believes isn’t caused by the stereotypical assumption that Black consumers just don’t manage money well.
“We are very good with money,” Williams says. “We just have had a lot of hurdles in our history that have stopped us from being as wealthy. And we’ve had times in our history where we have built wealth and it’s been burned down, whether that’s Black Wall Street or other situations.”
In Williams’ mind, AI disrupts that historical inequality.
“We are starting at an even playing field with everybody else, Williams tells TheGrio. “The reality is Black folks don’t know how to use AI, white folks don’t know how to use AI. And so by us running into this with speed and with our ingenuity, with our creativity, the sky is the limit in terms of how we can use it to benefit our community and to build wealth.”
Google has partnered with OneUnited to make WiseOne available for 10,000 new users. There is currently a waiting list, which people can sign up for to get news of the program’s official launch. While the normal cost for the service is $9.95 monthly, anyone who joins the waitlist by December 31, 2025 will receive the first year free. Even non-members of OneUnited are eligible to use the tool if they sign up.
OneUnited’s WiseOne tool is enhanced by its bank-level security features and is set up to provide proactive suggestions to users about everything from paying off debt to creating a strategy for savings. In addition to a conversational component, the tool includes a financial literacy library for users to lookup a range of wealth building and money management topics.
Black America Meets the “Fourth Industrial Revolution”
Despite AI’s relative newness, Williams says she doesn’t worry about whether users will struggle with figuring it out.
“The reality is that our community [members] are actually early adopters to technology,” Williams tells theGrio. “We were early adopters to social media…to smartphones. We’re early adopters to everything cultural that happens. We are going to be early adopters to AI.”
Billionaire Black business mogul Robert F. Smith has frequently framed the topic of technological disruption as the “fourth industrial revolution.”
“Technology is creating a whole new set of on ramps to the 21st century economy, and together we will help assure that African Americans will acquire the tech skills and be the beneficiaries in sectors that are being automated,” Smith said during his viral 2019 Morehouse College commencement speech where he paid of student debts of the entire graduating class.
As Black America navigates devastating job losses and layoffs, driven in part by federal policy and ironically, the very technological revolution Smith spoke about, his wish for Black people to find windows of opportunity to innovate or learn tech appears to match OneUnited’s approach to banking.
Where others have sought to exploit low-income and moderate-income bank customers, OneUnited says it’s given out over a billion in loans and doesn’t plan on stopping.
“Almost zero losses,” Williams says, reflecting on the Black communities she serves and hopes will be further empowered by knowing their financial value, whether they use the WiseOne tool or not.
“Our community pays us back. So, I think we gotta flip the switch and say, ‘Okay, let’s not let’s not believe what they’re saying about us.’”
