CDARS & ICS

Beneficial State Bank participates in two programs, CDARS (The Certificate of Deposit Account Registry Service) and ICS (Insured Cash Sweep), that allow people and entities to deposit more than $250,000 in the bank and still have it FDIC insured by partnering with other participating banks to distribute their deposits.

THE PROJECT

Beneficial State Bank participates in a program called CDARS (The Certificate of Deposit Account Registry Service). Developed and managed by Promontory Interfinancial Network, this program allows depositors with more than $250,000 in deposits to spread these deposits into separate CDs at several banks, allowing them to have access to FDIC insurance on large deposits, earn a return, and enjoy the ease of having only one bank to manage a relationship with. 

To keep these distributed deposits as mission-aligned as possible, Beneficial State Foundation has done extensive due diligence to help ensure that funds placed in CDARS at Beneficial State are as mission and values aligned as possible by customizing the list of banks in which their deposits will be shared. Deposits can only be placed in smaller community banks, under $1 billion and do not operate in high fossil fuel extraction areas. This ensures that our customers are not inadvertently placing their deposits in big banks.

We are doing this same customization with a parallel program for deposit and money market accounts, called ICS (Insured Cash Sweep).

OUR IMPACT

While we aren’t attempting to measure a specific community impact with this unique approach to CDARs, there are two general outcomes of this program:

  1. Mission-driven depositors get comfort in knowing that their CDARs deposits aren’t supporting big banks.  
  2. More broadly, this program helps to keep more money with mission-aligned banks and avoids adding deposits to big banks, which reduces money available to support misaligned lending by these banks.

MOVING FORWARD

At this point, Beneficial State intends to continue participating in the CDARS and ICS programs as long as they exist, and will periodically review and update customization criteria to ensure maximum possible mission alignment.

 

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