The bank account for people other banks said no to just passed 900 customers

BEND — When Rosa Delgado proposed a checking account for people who had been turned away by other banks, a colleague told her it would be 'a nice charity.' Eight years later the program, Second Chance Checking, has opened its 900th account, and Meridian Trust Bank says its customers default less often than those on the bank's standard checking product.

The account is aimed at Oregonians who appear in ChexSystems, the industry database that records past overdrafts and closed accounts and that most banks use to screen applicants. An estimated one in eight adults in the state has a record there, according to a 2024 study by the Oregon Bankers Association, and many are effectively locked out of the banking system for five years as a result.

'The story I kept hearing in the branch was the same,' said Delgado, 48, who heads retail banking for the three-branch bank and opened its Bend location in 2009. 'Someone lost a job in 2016, overdrew an account by $140, and in 2024 still couldn't open a checking account anywhere. We were asking people to prove they'd be fine for five years before we'd let them have a debit card.'

Second Chance accounts carry a $5 monthly fee, no overdraft facility, and a mandatory 30-minute session with a branch banker. After twelve months of good standing the account converts automatically to the bank's standard product. Delgado said the bank's internal numbers show a twelve-month default rate of 1.6 percent on the program, against 2.1 percent for ordinary checking.

Dr. Anita Sharma, an economist at Reed College who chairs the bank's governance committee and formerly worked at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, said the figures match a decade of research. 'Access to banking and risk of loss are not the same variable,' she said. 'Rosa built a product on that finding before most banks had read the paper.'

Three other Oregon community banks have since introduced similar products, two of them after Delgado presented her results to the state bankers' association in 2023. She said she would like it to be more. 'I'd be happy if every bank in the state copied it and we lost the customers to them,' she said. 'That would mean it worked.'

Delgado, who grew up in a Hood River orchard family and still returns for the pear harvest each August, said the idea came from a roadside fruit stand rather than a banking textbook. 'People remember whether you were kind to them long after they forget the interest rate,' she said. 'It turns out they also pay their bills.'