Jordan Miller Meets the Moment: Why the Longtime Executive Bet on Black-Owned Adelphi Bank

When Jordan A. Miller Jr. retired as Fifth Third Bank’s regional president and CEO in 2018, he was sure of one thing: “I was gonna do something, but I wasn't gonna work.” 

Miller had served some 35 years in Ohio’s banking industry, including his 20-year tenure with Fifth Third and a 14-year stint with Huntington Bank prior to it. He figured he’d at least spend his early retirement sitting on a few boards and finally realizing his golfing dreams.   

But, just over a year in, the pandemic hit, and he, like everyone else, was stuck inside. Shortly after, the police murder of George Floyd ignited a racial reckoning in cities across the nation that saw fervent protests erupt by day and chaos take over at night.  

Columbus’ civil unrest extended through the summer. So, too, did the conversations the demonstrations provoked. The Black retiree was left pondering what true racial justice for Black Americans could really mean and what shapes it could take.   

Then came a phone call and an audacious idea. Franklin County Commissioner Kevin Boyce rang in August 2020 with a proposal for a mission-driven, financial institution that would serve Columbus’ under-resourced communities. In the discord’s wake, the racial wealth gap had risen to the forefront of Boyce’s mind as a pertinent barrier to racial equality for Black Americans.  

During the call, Boyce and Miller lamented that African Americans’ economic buying power has hardly improved, despite the gains the Civil Rights Movement fostered and some individuals’ improved financial access. Federal Reserve data shows that the percentage of Black wealth—contrasted with white Americans’ overwhelming majority share—has hovered around just 4 percent of Americans' total wealth since 1989. In a capitalist system like the United States’, that disparity renders most Black folks nearly powerless. 

“Once you look at some of the statistics around Black wealth, you start thinking through it and saying, ‘Well, how else can you be part of a solution?’ ” Miller says. “So that’s why I jumped in.” 

Really, Miller leapt. He ended his retirement almost as quickly as it had started. The day after the call, he agreed to join Boyce and his business associate, Kamran Haydar, in developing the project. Miller entered a new phase in his careerlong mission of fostering greater economic empowerment for Black people in the city that raised him. He and other Black Columbus leaders began to focus on creating a more inclusive financial institution with Miller at the helm.  

They called it Adelphi Bank.  

➽ Many people in Miller’s circle first thought the idea was a novelty—a great proposal but nothing more. Besides, leaving retirement to start a bank? “I said, ‘You’re crazy because you’ve been waiting for this retirement for years to continue to improve your golf game,’ ” recalls Kala Gibson, Fifth Third’s executive vice president and chief corporate responsibility officer, and Miller’s colleague of 12 years.  

“But I wasn't surprised at all,” Gibson says. “If there's anyone who's going to come out of retirement and put some of his own personal things to the side in order for the greater good, it's going to be Jordan Miller.” 

Miller graduated from Central High School in 1969 and served in the Air Force for six years after an unsuccessful stint at Ohio State University. After following in his WWII-veteran father’s footsteps, he earned a degree in finance from the University of Maryland and landed his first banking job at the Comptroller of the Currency’s Columbus office. 

Gibson gravitated toward Miller at a corporate event in Cincinnati during his first week with Fifth Third in 2011. Miller was one of three Black bankers present and one of a handful of Black bank presidents Gibson had met over the course of his then 20-plus-year career.  

Miller and Gibson bonded over their shared identity, with the elder banker helping the younger man acclimate to the company. They’d often discuss their responsibility as Black bankers to prioritize increasing financial inclusion and access to disadvantaged communities. “You can see that coming out when you think about Jordan’s career,” Gibson says, describing Miller as a trailblazer, a role model and a financial freedom fighter. 

While at Fifth Third, Miller paved the way for other marginalized people to succeed. He mentored and primed current Fifth Third Central Ohio president Francie Henry for the role and convinced Fifth Third veteran Stephanie Green—one among its smaller crop of Black women bankers—to consider the job on the wealth and assets management team that the current South Florida regional president says changed the entire course of her career.  

Outside of work, Miller poured into the community, serving on boards for United Way of Central Ohio and Nationwide Children’s Hospital. Shortly after retiring, he became a fundraising co-chair in the effort to build a new clubhouse for the Boys & Girls Club of Milo-Grogan, where he and his brothers spent time after school to stay out of trouble.  

Because Miller shaped his professional life around championing Black financial freedom, independence and economic mobility in Columbus, Green says, it tracks that he’d shape Adelphi Bank to do the same. “This is clearly a passion project,” she says. “This is about serving a community that he was a part of for so long and was raised in for so long. … It's doing well, while you do good.” 

➽ By January 2021, Miller and Boyce had settled on founding a Black bank—specifically, a minority depository institution, which is a distinction granted according to the institution’s ownership or the demographics of its board and surrounding community. To qualify as an African American MDI, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. requires that 51 percent of Adelphi’s owners be Black, or for a majority of both the bank’s board and local community to be Black.  

Per the recommendation of Crabbe, Brown & James managing partner Larry James, Miller would lead the venture, hand-picking its team and convening with regulatory bodies for its approval. Boyce would serve as vice chairman, tackling community outreach and working a pool of potential investors, while Haydar would research banking technology.  

They assembled Adelphi’s majority-Black voting board, packing the nine-member group of founders with seven local Black leaders, including James, former Mayor Mike Coleman, Squire Patton Boggs senior partner Alex Shumate and Karen Morrison, the senior vice president of OhioHealth. The FDIC granted them provisional approval in May 2022, and they launched a $20 million fundraising effort that August with hopes of opening by the end of the year.  

By February 2023, they had organized $24 million in required tier one equity from each member’s personal contributions and investments from the larger community, including Huntington Bank, KeyBank, Fifth Third and a number of local businesses and organizations. With its newly minted assets, final FDIC approval and a team of talented bankers, Columbus’ first Black-owned bank since the 1920s—and the nation’s first in more than 20 years—soft-opened that month with an app and ability to open accounts. Adelphi’s hard launch came in May, commemorated with a ribbon-cutting ceremony attended by Gov. Mike DeWine and Fifth Third Bancorp president and CEO Timothy Spence.  

Now, the bank’s brick-and-mortar location lives across from the Lincoln Theatre in a commercial lot of the Adelphi Quarter development at the northeast corner of East Long Street and North Garfield Avenue, intentionally placed in the heart of King-Lincoln Bronzeville, the historic Black neighborhood on the Near East Side of Columbus. “Every Monday, when our team gets together, we think, ‘Our job is to focus on the Black community.’ That’s what we do, and there’s no other bank that has that mission in this town,” Miller says, adding, “We're going to focus on making meaningful, sustainable, long-term changes that impact generations of wealth.” 

➽ In late July, the 71-year-old CEO and chairman of Adelphi strides through the bank’s glass doors into the lobby. He wears a tailored navy suit without a tie and carries a blue “Best Team Ever” tumbler with his name printed on the back.  

He greets every co-worker by name and introduces me to all the team members on the floor before we head to the backroom offices to meet the rest. “He’s the man,” says Gary, a customer consulting with an Adelphi banker about a nonprofit.  

Though many of the bank’s interior walls are a muted royal blue or a calming white, almost everything about the bank itself is Black, Miller explains on the walk to the boardroom, which resides temporarily in the adjacent apartment building. Black-owned architecture firm Moody Nolan designed the interior, and contractors with Black-owned Sessley Construction, in partnership with Miles-McClellan Construction, built it. Much of Adelphi's team is Black, too.  

The second-floor corner suite’s living room-turned-meeting space sports a long conference table flanked by eight black swivel chairs and two TVs. “The Story of Adelphi Bank”—a titled collage of framed candid photos showing board members and bank executives getting dinner, meeting as a team and viewing the bank during construction—covers the wall behind the head of the table. But the story actually begins with a picture at the corner of the L-shaped hallway that leads to the main area.  

Miller points out the image of Boyce, City Council President Shannon Hardin and U.S. Rep. Joyce Beatty being pepper-sprayed by Columbus police during a protest Downtown in 2020. Adelphi ultimately arose from that run-in with police and the subsequent conversations Boyce had with those trying to make sense of the violence. “Africans in America have been out of slavery for less years than it existed in this country,” Boyce recalls telling Haydar the night he was sprayed. “There are still elements that we are working to overcome just from a disparity standpoint.” 

➽ Forty-three percent of Black adults had a family income of less than $25,000 in 2021, a figure at least twice the rate among white and Asian adults, according to Federal Reserve data. Black adults were also more likely to have lower credit scores, a 2021 Brookings Institute report found, which forces them to either pay more for traditional banking services or turn to alternatives like payday loans to meet their needs. As a result, Black Americans were less likely to be fully banked than Americans overall that year, with 40 percent being unbanked or underbanked compared to only 19 percent of American adults.  

Some of the barriers between banks and Black people are the latter’s mistrust of financial institutions and the former’s overreliance on the outdated credit score system, says Nicole Elam, the president and CEO of the National Bankers Association, a trade group that advocates for minority depositories. Systemic racism, however, is the greatest hurdle. 

Racist U.S. policies stretching back more than a century, Elam explains, systematically undervalued and devalued African Americans’ credit profiles and neighborhoods against that of their white counterparts, blocking access to wealth builders like home ownership and business loans. Miller’s parents experienced this housing discrimination firsthand in the form of redlining when they settled in Milo-Grogan in the 1950s. When his father, Jordan Sr., approached a bank for a loan to bridge the gap between the $3,000 he’d saved and the $8,000 home on Second Avenue he wanted to purchase, he was denied. If the seller hadn’t offered to loan him the difference, Miller’s father would have never been able to buy their first home.  

“The history of structural racism is such that it has eroded trust between communities of color and banks,” says Michael Neal, a principal research and equity scholar for the Urban Institute. “But a Black bank is one kind of bridge in terms of being able to trust that the bank is going to basically keep and maintain your finances and, ultimately, your wealth.” 

That’s what Miller wants Adelphi to become: “a place where people would come in and talk about what their issues are and what they're trying to solve” with a team of bankers who look like them and understand their needs. Though it brings keen knowledge to Black customers, the venture aims to serve any patron in Franklin County in search of greater financial access. The team hopes to one day offer financial literacy programming and other financial education assistance.  

Miller has also implemented an unofficial dress code—one that’s not so formal that it’s unapproachable—to make customers feel more welcome than the tellers he feared as a child when his mother, Ruby, well-dressed for the occasion, brought her children to the bank.  

Ultimately, he sees Adelphi as a continuation of Columbus’ Adelphi Loan & Savings Co., an institution founded in 1921 just a half block away, to serve a prosperous Black community.  

➽ In the 1920s, Long Street was a bustling Black commercial and civic center bolstered by the influx of Black Americans in search of industrial work during the Great Migration. But the construction of I-71 in the 1960s split the neighborhood, leading to the demolition of several businesses and contributing to its decline.  

The interstate’s construction also bisected Miller’s Milo-Grogan, resulting in the demolition of around 400 homes. His family left the neighborhood for Driving Park shortly after because the city had decided to tear down their house and others to extend a playground. By then, the original Adelphi Loan & Savings Co. had already been closed for 40 years—it had collapsed during the Great Depression and later became the McNabb funeral home, which served the community until 2013.  

The facade of that historic bank, preserved during the 2019 demolition, was incorporated into the development that now bears its name. Its presence serves as both a reminder of how far the Black community has come and a symbol of where its successor could take them. 

“MDIs were born out of racism because Black, brown and immigrant communities couldn't go to mainstream financial institutions for their banking services,” Elam says. “And the unfortunate reality today is that MDIs are still sitting in and serving these communities at a higher rate than non-MDIs.” 

A May National Bankers Association report found that MDIs largely operate in predominantly minority communities, with 87 percent of MDIs residing in urban areas. Twenty-five percent of MDIs run in ZIP codes that don’t have another physical bank present.  

The presence of MDIs in those communities also meant residents were more likely to be approved for loans and mortgages. Columbus residents’ use of Adelphi’s financial services will create a fruitful cycle, Neal says, with repayments returning more money to the bank, which it can then pump back into the community.  

Though the total number of MDIs has fluctuated over the last 20 years, the number of Black MDIs declined more than 50 percent, according to FDIC data, dropping from 48 at the end of 2001 to 22 by the end of 2023's first quarter. The cause? Black banks generally have less capital than larger, non-MDIs because of the historic exclusion from capital flows and the wealth gap’s impact on the Black communities they serve. 

Those odds make Adelphi Bank all the more important. “It's not just the dollars—I mean, that matters—but it's also the perception that says, ‘We're revaluing places that have been devalued, and we're putting our stake in the ground to say these are neighborhoods that are worth fighting for, that are worth putting businesses in, that are worth living in and getting mortgages in,” Anthony Barr, the research and impact director for the National Bankers Association, says of Black banks. 

➽ Since Adelphi’s launch, the founding board members have been feeling the pressure of the community’s expectations. As the bank’s head, much of that weight falls on Miller. “This will be his tester,” Larry James says. “There are a number of banks in Central Ohio. There are a number of CEOs and presidents and, for the most part, they're interchangeable. This is different. This will be his opportunity to really make a mark.” 

So far, Adelphi is just ahead of its projections to break even within its first three years. The bankers have built a strong pipeline of loans, committed about $15 million on its balance sheet and aim to expand digital services by early next year. Local organizations like the Columbus Urban League, the NAACP and historically Black churches have followed their investments with deposits, and the turnout at events is growing, as is the customer base.  

In five years, Miller suspects Adelphi will have to do another capital infusion to grow the bank’s balance sheet. In 10, he hopes Adelphi would have leaned hard enough into SBA lending to build relationships with small business owners that would help them grow their ventures and incentivize them to seek services from other Black providers.   

For himself, the seasoned banker sees retirement—an actual one this time. He has committed to leading the bank in its de novo period—the bank’s first three years, when the FDIC supervises it more strictly—and is currently talking succession with his team. But in typical Miller fashion, he plans to stick around in some capacity after he steps down.  

At the end of our interview, the Columbus native takes me through another path in the labyrinth of Adelphi Quarter to view the historic Adelphi Loan & Savings Co. frontage. He greets every stranger along the way and, afterward, notes the new developments coming to the area.  

As he heads back inside, Miller reflects on being profiled. He sometimes feels embarrassed by the amount of media attention he receives, he says. He’s just one part of a brilliant team and feels the others should also get to bask in some of the glory. It’s not just a Jordan A. Miller Jr. story. 

In that way, he and Adelphi are similar. Just as his spotlight inadvertently illuminates some of those team members, Adelphi’s work to increase Black economic prosperity benefits the city’s overall economy. 

“That's one of the big outcomes: It's not just a Black story. It’s a story about people, and about people that are trying to improve their lives and have been here. They have fought to be part of the American dream,” he says, adding: “We’re just an engine that can help people realize their own dreams and goals.” 

This story is from the October 2023 issue of Columbus Monthly and the Fall 2023 issue of Columbus CEO.