Teri Williams still remembers trailing her great-grandmother through a small Florida town, calling her Ma Honey. The woman she followed ran a sweet shop, ran a smokehouse and ran a roadhouse where young Teri learned to play pool. She also collected rent on rental units and built the houses her family lived in, Williams told Business Insider.
Today Williams helps lead OneUnited Bank, a community institution she and her husband Kevin pieced together in the mid-1990s out of four separate lenders in Boston, Los Angeles and Miami. Three decades in, they have raised two kids, now in their early thirties, and watched them make the same kinds of money mistakes their classmates did.
The lessons that didn't stick
Williams tried, hard, to make saving the family religion. Her framing was simple: a war chest gives you permission to gamble. Buy a house. Start something. The bigger the swing, the bigger the upside, and the cushion matters because errors are inevitable.
Then reality walked in. One of her children, already an adult, rang home baffled by a credit card statement. She had read the balance as money left to spend. It was, of course, money she owed. Williams describes her own reaction as near-collapse, followed quickly by self-correction: terminology is genuinely confusing, and there is no embarrassment in not grasping it on the first pass.
Her kids also invest differently than she does. Williams built her portfolio around pooled mutual funds. Her children pick single stocks and have dabbled in cryptocurrency. She is unbothered, calling generational drift in financial habits normal and expected.
Our analysis
The leadership insight here is uncomfortable. Financial fluency does not pass automatically from parent to child, even when the parent runs a bank. Williams had every resource and her kid still misread a statement. That is not a parenting failure. It is evidence that financial concepts only land when real money is on the line and the consequences are personal.
The deeper trade-off is between control and capability. Hand a young person a card too early and you sponsor a crash course in interest charges. Hand it over too late and they leave the nest illiterate. Williams' story points to a middle path: talk money early, let them bleed a little on small stakes, and accept that their portfolio will look nothing like yours.
Say you lead a small team and want to lift financial literacy across it. Don't lecture. Pair each lesson with a decision the team is about to face, a raise negotiation, a benefits enrolment, a stock-option vest. Abstract advice evaporates by Monday. Tying the lesson to a Tuesday decision makes it stick.
It also helps to know the audience. Williams has spent years pushing school programmes that flag products like check cashers and payday lenders. Those products tend to cluster in communities the mainstream banking system underserves, which is exactly the audience OneUnited was built to reach.
What to watch next
Watch whether OneUnited's school-based financial literacy programmes can scale beyond their current footprint. Community banks that teach children early are quietly shaping future customers, future employees and future voters. Williams' great-grandmother did the same work with a sweet shop and a hammer. Williams is doing it with curriculum design. The instrument changes. The mission is identical.
Key takeaways
- Ma Honey ran a sweet shop, a smokehouse, a roadhouse and rental units in the segregated South, and built houses her family lived in.
- Williams' own adult child once mistook a credit card balance for available funds.
- OneUnited has built school-based financial literacy programmes that flag products like check cashers and payday lenders.
Frequently asked questions
Who is Teri Williams?
She is the operating chief at OneUnited Bank, a community institution she and her husband have run for thirty years.
What businesses did Ma Honey run?
Ma Honey ran a sweet shop, a smokehouse, a roadhouse and rental properties in the segregated South.
What financial mistake did Williams' child make?
One of her children, as a young adult, read a credit card statement as available spending rather than as a debt balance.
What is OneUnited Bank?
It was formed in the mid-1990s by combining four community banks in Boston, Los Angeles and Miami that served Black neighbourhoods.
Why does Williams push financial literacy?
She believes a savings buffer unlocks risk-taking, and that financial terminology is tricky enough that even children of bankers need explicit teaching.
Source: businessinsider.com