The former Illinois Service Federal branch on 87th Street soon to reopen

 If you live in Chatham and do business with GN Bank - formerly known as Illinois Service Federal - is reopening their former branch on 87th Street & King Drive. According to Steve Daniels from Crain's:

Chairman Papa Kwesi Nduom, whose wealthy family rescued the bank in 2016 with millions in fresh capital when it was on the brink of failure, says the Chatham branch is open on a drive-thru basis for withdrawals and deposits. It will return to full service once licensing is completed, he says.

“This is being done to signal to the community that we are putting customer service high on our priority list,” he says in an email.

If you were following the FB page Concerned Citizens of Chatham the issue with this closure is what would replace the bank on this property. There were concerned about a marijuana dispensary possibly being located there. Well now a bank will be back on this property.

BTW, this article was from last year. GN Bank is a Ghanian-American company who rescued ISF in 2016 from failure. In this December 2021 article from ProPublica we find out GN Bank has a number of issues:

Five years later, the historic institution — renamed GN Bank — remains deeply troubled. Under the Nduoms, the bank has closed one of its two locations, cut staff, alienated many longtime customers and effectively stopped making new home loans, though that’s one of the central reasons for its existence. In 2020, the bank was again put under restrictions after regulators found “new violations of law, rule or regulation.”

Yet the Nduoms aren’t solely responsible for GN’s struggles. Regulators have failed to carry out a federal mandate to “preserve and promote” Black-owned banks, a ProPublica investigation has found.

Leading up to the Nduoms’ acquisition, the federal Office of the Comptroller of the Currency ordered the bank to reduce the risk in its loans, which led to less revenue. Then, the agency signed off on the new owners, even though they lacked banking experience in the United States and had investments abroad that posed known regulatory risks. Since then, the bank has been under close watch, yet the Nduoms have made a series of decisions that diminished the bank’s profile and quality of service.