TD Bank staff wait to greet people arriving for the ribbon-cutting of its new Roxbury branch on May 9, 2025. Photo by Sam Minton | Banker & Tradesman Staff
TD Bank’s newest Massachusetts branch is a window into how the megabank – and its next-door rival – believes it can add new customers by opening physical locations in historically underbanked areas.
The 3,230-square-foot storefront opened May 9 in Nubian Square, the historic heart of Boston’s Black community, and a neighborhood that has sizable Dominican, Cabo Verdean and Caribbean presences.
“When we talk about the ecosystem of Roxbury, it’s literally right inside these four walls,” said Sheryl McQuade, TD’s regional president for its metro New England division. “It’s really the whole ecosystem of Roxbury we’re bringing into the four walls and giving back to the community, while we then bring business and financial education and advice to the community.”
That financial literacy programming lies at the heart of how TD Bank executives said they plan to use their new branch to bring in business customers and add to the bank’s balance sheet.
National-level survey data suggests the bank’s strategy is based on a real appetite for such services in minority-majority communities.
It’s also not the first time that big banks have deliberately located branches in Massachusetts’ historically underbanked neighborhoods in search of new customers – Chase Bank opened its own Nubian Square branch in 2020 and a Mattapan Square branch in 2021 with a similar promise of financial coaching for all community members.
And Berkshire Bank set up now-shuttered Reevx Labs non-branch coworking spaces in Nubian Square in early 2020 and downtown Springfield in 2021 with the hope of gaining potential customers’ trust by offering financial wellness programs and networking with nonprofits and underserved small businesses.
According to a 2018 Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) national survey, financial literacy rates are not evenly dispersed across race and ethnicities.
The FINRA study showed that Asian and white Americans were able to correctly answer 3.2 out of six questions that assess basic financial literacy, while Hispanic Americans were able to answer 2.6 and Black Americans 2.3. Additionally, according to according to the National Institutes of Health, African American and Hispanic individuals with higher levels of education demonstrated significantly lower financial literacy scores than their white peers.
“We have a very strong value proposition, and it really centers around advice and guidance,” McQuade said. “We want to build financial success for the customers that walk in the store, and we do that by providing advice and guidance and meet[ing] them where they are and help them build a path for their own financial success.”
TD Bank’s Nubian Square branch isn’t the first time a megabank has looked to use financial wellness programming to gain customers in majority-minority neighborhoods. Chase Bank’s Mattapan branch, opened with help from CEO Jamie Dimon (center-right) in November 2021, was launched with a similar strategy. Photo by Lucy Kennedy | Courtesy of Chase Bank
A Branch that Looks Like the Neighborhood
Bank branches have a hard time winning customers, whether they’re in Roxbury or Rockport, unless they ensure potential clients are able to see themselves reflected when walking into the branch. That’s why Chase Bank is intentional about how it hires to staff its locations, said Richa Goyal, the bank’s Greater Boston at market director.
“We want to be the bank for all,” she said. “We want to be trusted in the community and it starts with ensuring that our customers are comfortable when they come into the branches. The other thing that we’re really intentional with is making sure that when we’re staffing these branches from the same community, because we realize that a lot of people want to work with people in the community that are familiar with the businesses that are around them.”
TD Bank’s new Nubian Square location is decorated in a similar spirit. Local art is featured throughout the branch, including murals depicting the community in bankers’ offices.
“Working in different store locations, this is the first where I’ve seen the custom approach that’s been tailored to the community,” branch manager Justin Cross said. “It’s a showstopper regardless at what one you stop and see.
The bank hung works by local painters on one wall, and filled another wall – which sits behind its bankers’ offices – with a colorful mural of local landmarks and notable community members.
“It’s bright, vibrant, welcoming, and it has references to Roxbury throughout so people know that it’s tailored and personalized to this specific location,” Cross said of the mural
In decorating its locations, Chase balances establishing an expectation for what a Chase branch should look like while also adding custom elements to its locations that make them “unique,” Goyal said.
“We want people to be able to recognize that the brand is Chase, but it’s also really important that our branches reflect the community that they’re in,” she said. “For example, in Mattapan, we like to have art in the branch from the local artists. We have a lot of student branches, so we tend to focus more on student art. We have a branch in Fenway and we have a wall made out of that [green color] because it’s right next to Fenway Park.”
Bankers’ offices at TD Bank’s new, 3,230-square-foot branch in Nubian Square share a back wall that’s painted with a mural depicting prominent community members and local landmarks. Photo by Sam Minton | Banker & Tradesman Staff
A Platform to Recruit New Customers
But just because a branch opens a new location in a community doesn’t mean that financial institutions will instantaneously gain large amounts of new customers. Chase bankers a concerted effort to go out into the community and introduce themselves to local small businesses, Goyal said.
“We do the old-fashioned just, knocking on businesses’” doors, she said. “We go into the different businesses, just introduce ourselves with no intention of selling or talking about products or services. It’s about building a relationship before anything else. As we’ve been doing this, at least in Massachusetts, we found that as long as we’re building relationships, we’re building trust, people will come back because people want to work with people.”
As it markets its new Nubian Square presence, TD’s McQuade said it plans to foreground its financial education services as it looks for new customers.
Sam Minton
Leading with financial education, she said, is “a model that that works, and we feel will be able to do that well here in Nubian Square. Whether it’s small business, whether it’s consumers, whether it’s a wealth journey, whatever it is, we’ll have a value proposition that’s grounded in advice.”
For its part, Chase will continue to invest in physical locations – on top of the 70-plus it already has in Massachusetts.
“We keep opening branches, because we are doing a great job just being able to build these relationships and people are coming in” Goyal said. “Especially now, they want to talk to somebody. They want to build a relationship, and they want to work with somebody when it comes to making those long-term goal decisions.”
Artificial intelligence has a hard time helping humans with long-term decision-making such as buying a house, she said, so even with technological advances there will still be a need for in-person locations and human financial guidance.
“I think people are here to stay,” she said. “I think these branches, they’re going to continue to stay and they’re going to continue to make an impact for a very long time.”
