James Mundy's campaign to create a black-owned, Internet-only bank brought him to Pittsburgh several times last December, his visits culminating in a series of breakfasts, lunches and dinners at The Rivers Club with the Rev. William Curtis of the Mount Ararat Baptist Church.

		Graphic: The biggest black-owned financial institutions in the U.S.

The trips from Boston paid off for Mr. Mundy.

In January, the East Liberty church became the first African-American church in the country to invest money in Mr. Mundy's new national banking venture, called BankBlackwell. While its investment was relatively small -- $50,000 -- the participation of Pittsburgh's largest black church (7,500 members) knocked loose similar-size investments from the Macedonia Baptist Church in the Hill District and several churches in other states, including South Carolina, Georgia, California, Michigan, Texas, Massachusetts and Washington, D.C.

Why invest the church's money?

While the Rev. Curtis, 39, believes most banks in Pittsburgh are "pretty responsive" to the black community, the thought of creating a national black-owned bank was too exciting to resist. "I want to see [BankBlackwell] succeed," he said.

BankBlackwell is targeting black churches nationwide in its effort to raise $16.5 million in capital by June 23 -- a deadline set by regulators. Mr. Mundy says he has $5 million to 6 million in hand now. The goal is to open the first black-owned bank with a national footprint -- albeit without physical branches -- and recycle the growing wealth of African Americans back into city neighborhoods via mortgages, development assistance and financing for traditional pillars of the African-American community, such as churches.

Banks -- the center of wealth in any community -- still are largely out of the hands of African Americans. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation lists only 45 black-owned institutions in the United States -- and none has more than $1 billion in assets. The largest is New York's Carver Federal Savings Bank, with $648 million in assets. Most black-owned banks are regional in scope, focusing almost exclusively on their cities of origin, and many find it difficult to compete with the larger, better-financed banks in their communities.

Pittsburgh's only contribution to the national list is The Dwelling House Savings & Loan Association, based in the Hill District. The Dwelling House, which Robert Lavelle took over in 1957, was the first lender to target the low-income Hill neighborhood, and it still provides credit to people who otherwise would be turned down. Its asset base of $19.9 million ranks 40th nationally, out of 45 black-owned institutions.

Mr. Mundy, the founder of BankBlackwell, is a former executive with Boston-based OneUnited Bank, the second-largest African-American-owned bank in the country with $540 million in assets. He left OneUnited in 2003 to create a bank without any branches, operating entirely on the Internet. Other such cyber banks already exist, but none is owned by an African American, according to Mr. Mundy.

OneUnited, Mr. Mundy's old employer, began offering online banking earlier this year, saying it will open accounts for customers anywhere in the country.

Executives with OneUnited have argued that Mr. Mundy's idea will appeal only to the affluent and that most customers still feel more comfortable placing their money at physical banks -- rather than those that exist entirely in cyberspace.

Mr. Mundy admits that his target is middle- and upper-income black Americans, citing the growth in black wealth across the United States. The number of black households with more than $50,000 in income is up from 2 million in the early 1990s to almost 4 million a decade later, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. And wealthy blacks are "more inclined than their white counterparts to make purchasing decisions based on community or race," writes Mr. Mundy in a pitch to potential investors.

It makes sense for Mr. Mundy to target black churches as part of his fund-raising effort -- there are 70,000 in the United States with 21 million members who tend to be wealthier and better educated than non-church goers, he said. The woman who made many of the first introductions for Mr. Mundy in Pittsburgh was 46-year-old Madelyn Toliver, a Mount Ararat church member and independent human resources consultant.

And Mr. Mundy is not the only one to use black churches as a conduit for new business. Chuck Sanders, for example, sponsors gospel concerts and hands out leaflets after Sunday services as a way of promoting Urban Settlement Services, a business that helps with real estate closings, and Urbanmortgage.com, a company that provides home ownership loans. Retired Pittsburgh Steelers running back Jerome Bettis is a partner in Urbanmortgage.com.

Relying on churches for investment capital is "something old that has become new again," said Mr. Sanders, 41, who works from the Hill. "It's nothing that African Americans didn't do 50 to 100 years ago."