Nasdaq has no "opening bell." Unlike the New York Stock Exchange, with its loud and chaotic trading floor, Nasdaq is entirely electronic, as befits the many high-tech companies whose shares are listed on it. But that hasn't stopped Nasdaq from making the daily start of trading into a televised ritual, much like the ringing of the bell down on Wall Street.
Crystal Baal
Bassford: “the kind of face for corporate America that corporate America needs”?
Details
Related Content
More About
Most mornings, representatives from a Nasdaq-traded company will come to a Times Square studio and ceremoniously push a button that purports to launch trading. And during holidays and significant events, Nasdaq often invites community groups and nonprofits to do the honors.
So it was that on the Friday before Martin Luther King Jr. Day this year, Roy Innis, chairman of the New York–based Congress of Racial Equality, stood before the cameras to push the magic button. Instrumental in organizing the Freedom Rides, and a sponsor of the 1963 March on Washington, CORE was a natural choice to open trading that day.
Not so intuitive was the man Innis brought along to stand at his right hand: Dennis Bassford, the blond, dimpled, 51-year-old co-founder and CEO of Moneytree, a Seattle-based company that's been widely criticized for preying on minorities.
It was a huge P.R. coup for the Moneytree founder, a big win in his energetic campaign to spruce up his industry's image—and his own. Often placed somewhere between tobacco companies and malt-liquor marketers in the ranks of most-loathed businesses, payday lending has long been accused of exploiting vulnerable people. But Bassford has carefully negotiated a new middle way for the business, expanding its reach while simultaneously investing in social service programs and reaching out to the very groups that are quick to blast him. In a press release last fall, Moneytree reported that its annual corporate giving is nearly $1 million. With the high-profile endorsement of a respected civil rights organization, it seems Bassford's labors are paying off. The image of him standing alongside Innis was broadcast around the country and ran in The New York Times.
Explaining the choice later, a spokesperson for CORE lauded Bassford as "the kind of face for corporate America that corporate America needs." He praised the company for its support of "financial literacy" programs, and for helping create a code of ethics for the payday lending industry.
Bassford's efforts haven't won over everyone, of course. Carl Mack, the former president of the Seattle NAACP branch, calls payday lending shops "piranhas in our community." Far from advancing the cause of civil rights, he says, the industry has targeted minorities with its low-dollar loans, leading them quickly into high levels of debt with exorbitant fees.
King County Council member Larry Gossett agrees, saying that while Bassford is a "nice guy," his business is a "usurious, parasitic entity" that takes advantage of people at the end of their rope. "I don't know how anybody in good conscience could support the payday loan industry," says Gossett, who is black. "The fact that you spend $150,000 a quarter helping nonprofits, that's nice, but that doesn't take away from the fact that overall, the industry is quite exploitative."
For his part Bassford says he doesn't see himself as either a hero or a villain in the ideological fight over payday lending, just someone offering up a credit option for people who might not otherwise be able to get it. "I believe that our customers totally understand this transaction," he says. "I think we represent a choice among the many choices that people have—and clearly a better choice."
Bassford graduated from Boise State—famous for its Smurf Turf blue football field—in 1980 with a degree in accounting. He became a certified public accountant, and worked in the field for two years before deciding it wasn't for him and moving to Seattle. He had been in town for a couple of months when a friend planted the idea of going into the check-cashing business in his head.
In 1983, Bassford, along with his brother and sister-in-law, opened the first Moneytree in Renton, with the initial capital all coming from family. "It wasn't a lot of money," he recalls. "It was pretty much my mom and grandma and brother and sister and I put together what we had." The primary business was cashing checks for a fee for people who didn't have the requisite accounts or identification necessary to get cash at a bank, or who just needed a place to cash a check during off hours. The siblings acted as tellers, managers, and operators as they began expanding the business.
Twelve years later, payday lending was legalized in Washington state, and Bassford was quick to jump in. The move was a good one for him. He's become the largest locally owned payday lender in the state, according to the Department of Financial Institutions (DFI) database, with 62 licensed locations. (Texas-based ACE Cash Express and Advance America, a publicly traded company based in South Carolina, both have roughly twice as many outlets in Washington.) Moneytree now extends across five Western states, with Washington still Bassford's biggest market.
To promote Moneytree's payday lending business in the mid-1990s, an actor donned a hokey caterpillar suit to declare the usefulness of the new loans in a pinched, nasal voice that was just obnoxious enough to be unforgettable. The caterpillar has since gone digital and has its own bobblehead doll.
