Show HN: BankLocal – Find local banks and invest in growing your community

Hi,<p>putting aside the debate over free market theory for the moment, as regards the banking industry the evidence is very clear and compelling: smaller sized banks and credit unions do in fact lend a greater portion of their assets to small businesses. This mainly has to do with the business structure of large vs. small banking institutions. To quote the FDIC&#x27;s 2012 Community Banking Study:<p>&quot;Community banks tend to be relationship lenders, characterized by local ownership, local control, and local decision making. By carrying out the traditional banking functions of lending and deposit gathering on a local scale, community banks foster economic growth and help to ensure that the financial resources of the local community are put to work on its behalf. Community banks have always been inextricably connected to entrepreneurship. As of 2011, they held 14 percent of banking industry assets, but 46 percent of the industry’s small loans to farms and businesses.&quot;<p>Analysis of our own data is even more telling: BankLocal data as of 12&#x2F;31&#x2F;13 shows that the nation’s four largest banks, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Citibank and Wells Fargo (collectively known as the Big-Four) only loaned 1.9% of their combined assets to small businesses compared to 10.6% for small and medium size banks.<p>If small businesses and the Main St. economy matter to you, then so should Local Banking.

While I guess it&#x27;s good to provide people with information that they want, I disagree with the premise that <i>Local banks and credit unions work within established localities and reinvest depositors&#x27; money into local businesses, farms, and individuals. To put it simply, they often use your money more responsibly than large megabanks, and your community benefits.</i><p>Every business is located somewhere. Why would it be better for a person to invest in projects located near themselves, than far away? From the way they phrase it, you&#x27;d think that megabanks [sic] throw the money into a black hole, or otherwise use it in some manner other than investing in businesses (which again, must be located somewhere).<p>The movement to buy&#x2F;invest locally goes against all of economic theory. Artificial barriers to trade (such as a choice to buy locally) reduce total welfare, and can rarely be justified in terms of income distribution (because the best tradeoff between total welfare and income distribution comes from taxation and redistribution).

Hi, one of the developers here. This is just a little side project I built with a financial analyst friend. Uses government data from the FDIC &#x2F; FFIEC &#x2F; NCUA and an open algorithm Bob developed to rank banks based on local impact. Clearly more we could do here but wanted to release an easy to use tool that could help people find and promote community banks. Response has been good so far, just won a social innovation challenge grant. Your feedback and thoughts (improvements, issues, etc) all very welcome. tia.