COLUMBUS — Erebor Bank, the fast-growing bank headquartered in Columbus, announced a nationwide Opportunity Initiative on Thursday, Oct. 15, beginning with a $20 million commitment to financial institutions in its hometown and a partnership with Adelphi Bank, Ohio’s first Black-owned bank.
The initiative is designed to route resources through the local financial institutions closest to commercial opportunities in urban and rural communities — the lenders who already know which small businesses, housing projects and employers in their neighborhoods are ready to grow but struggle to find funding.
Adelphi Bank, founded in 2023 and based in Columbus’s King-Lincoln Bronzeville neighborhood, is the initiative’s first partner. Its mission is to narrow the wealth gap by expanding homeownership, entrepreneurial resources and banking services in historically underserved Central Ohio communities, and the Erebor partnership is meant to let it deploy more capital, faster.
Former U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Marcia Fudge, a longtime Cleveland congresswoman, will chair the initiative. Her charge is to build the model first in Columbus, then carry it across Ohio and the country.
Fudge said she was honored to chair the effort, calling the partnership with community-based financial institutions the kind of innovative approach the country needs to fund commercial opportunities that continue to go underfunded in urban and rural America.
The programs the initiative supports are expected to range across housing, employment training and healthcare — the building blocks, the bank argues, of broad economic growth and a stronger middle class. Erebor plans to replicate the Adelphi model with local institutions in the same communities where its own customers operate.
Those customers give the effort an unusual reach. Erebor serves technology companies working to reindustrialize the United States across manufacturing, aerospace, defense, robotics, artificial intelligence and energy. The bank opened in early 2026 and says it has already grown past $8 billion in assets, making the $20 million commitment one of the largest ever by a de novo bank in its first year of operation.
Adelphi’s leadership framed the deal in neighborhood terms. Founder Kevin L. Boyce said partnerships like this are how capital moves into neighborhoods left out for generations, while Chairman and CEO Jordan Miller said Adelphi’s years of relationship-building in its communities will now be matched with the ability to put more money to work for small businesses, homeowners and commercial corridors. For Columbus, the test will be how quickly the commitment turns into loans residents can actually see.
