Forbes Inaugural BLK50 List Includes Liberty Bank’s Todd McDonald

The 43-year-old McDonald took over Liberty Bank and Trust in 2022, at that point, it was already the largest Black bank in America, and he has ideas about how to take the bank to the next level

The Forbes BLK50 List, according to Forbes, is an offshoot of the magazine’s former Wealthiest Black Americans list, which was created in order to catalog the richest and most powerful Black Americans. In its first edition, released on Dec. 20, the publication named Todd McDonald, the President of Liberty Bank among its honorees.

The outlet notes that the inaugural list is, in some ways, a correction of the old list. It includes activists, innovators, and entrepreneurs alongside those with generous net worth.

According to the list, the result is a group that includes McDonald, Beyonce, Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Fawn Weaver, Josh Aviv, John Hope Bryant, and Pinky Cole.

The 43-year-old McDonald took over Liberty Bank and Trust in 2022, at that point, it was already the largest Black bank in America, and he has ideas about how to take the bank to the next level.

“I want to get rid of denials,” McDonald told Forbes. Instead, he wants Liberty to set “conditions to every single request, so we can start reestablishing confidence” in banks within the Black community.

Liberty Bank was founded by McDonald’s father, Aden McDonald, in 1972, and the elder McDonald currently serves as its chairman and CEO.

The bank currently maintains 19 branch locations in 11 states, and McDonald eventually wants to see the bank expand across all 50 states.

McDonald has been busy building out partnerships for the bank, deepening the bank’s existing relationship with Chase, which has been growing steadily since 2017 when it entered into a mentor-protegé program, sponsored by the federal government.

That program was designed to foster investment and collaboration between institutions like Jamie Dimon’s JP Morgan Chase and Liberty Bank, which, according to McDonald, has been successful on both fronts.

“Dad and I engage with him (Dimon), like, three or four times a year,” McDonald told Nola.com. “He helps us. I gave him a list of small asks and likes to be a problem solver. He can just pick up the phone and make it happen.”

In 2023, both McDonald’s talked to WWLTV about their journeys in the banking industry. The younger McDonald indicated that Liberty Bank’s method of doing business sometimes contradicts conventional financial wisdom.

“We have been in business for 50 years, and we have lent to communities that have been the riskiest on paper and we’ve gotten the money back and been profitable,” McDonald told the outlet.

In an anecdote, Alden McDonald explained that compassion is the ethos of Liberty Bank, a staple of the City of New Orleans.

“You want to treat people the way you want to be treated. I’m a person. You’re a person. Everybody is a person, so you treat them as a person, not a number. So when Todd came over to the bank, that was the meaning for me. It wasn’t the succession. It wasn’t the legacy of me,” McDonald said, “It was the legacy of what this bank means to the community.”