Global Fair Banking Initiative (GFBI)
The Global Fair Banking Initiative (GFBI) is a cross-national collaboration to advance fair and inclusive financial systems everywhere in the world, along with effective standards and incentives that promote the highest professional benchmarks, best practices and responsive innovations from financial firms that are necessary to meet the evolving financial needs of diverse populations around the world. The National Community Reinvestment Coalition (NCRC) and its international partners with funding from the Ford Foundation initiated this challenging work. The GFBI has formed collaborations with groups in 79 countries that include Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Guatemala, India, Bangladesh, South Africa, Japan, Germany, and the UK. This work laid the groundwork for significant industry-community-government collaborations now beginning to bear fruit.
Taxpayers all over the world are now footing the bill to rescue banks. Yet, it is households who are feeling the worst effects of the meltdown in the global financial system. Mortgage rates are rising after consumers have been encouraged to take on excessive housing debt, savings and pensions are threatened, and unemployment is rising. Irresponsible lending practices are the cause of this crisis. Excessive financial risk waspassed down from banks to the public. Now the banks have lost faith in households to manage these, lost trust in each other’s ability to repay debts, and the supply of finance has frozen over. The response to this crisis must involve immediate support for households, but it must also lay the ground for new rules to govern the future provision of credit.
