Washington Trust to pay $9 million over discriminatory lending (updated)

Washington Trust Bancorp

27/09/2023 16:25

(Updates with details about settlement, complaint after
paragraph 1)
    By Sarah N. Lynch
       Sept 27 (Reuters) - Washington Trust Bank  WASH.O , the
largest community bank in the country, will pay $9 million to
settle civil rights charges that it discriminated against
primarily Black and Hispanic mortgage applicants in Rhode
Island, the U.S. Justice Department announced on Wednesday.
    The department's complaint against the bank alleges that
from 2016 through 2021, it engaged in a practice known as
redlining by failing to provide lending services to residents in
primarily Black and Hispanic neighborhoods in Rhode Island.
        Top department officials said that despite expanding
across the state, it never opened a branch in a Black or
Hispanic neighborhood, and that it relied on mortgage loan
officers working out of majority-white areas as the primary
source for generating new lending applications.
  
        An attorney for the bank could not be immediately
reached.
  
        "Through this agreement, we are sending a strong message
to the financial industry that we will not stand for
discriminatory and unlawful barriers in residential mortgage
lending," said Kristen Clarke, the Assistant Attorney General of
the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, at a press
conference on Wednesday. 
  
        Redlining refers to racial discrimination in lending
practices by banks and other financial institutions, a practice
that has harmed Black and Hispanic communities for decades. 
  

 (Reporting by Sarah N. Lynch; Editing by Mark Porter and
Timothy Gardner)
 ((sarah.n.lynch@thomsonreuters.com; 202-579-0289;))