Stephen Lange Ranzini is president and CEO of University Bank and president and CEO of University Bancorp, Inc.. He was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey and grew up in the Somerville, New Jersey area, where his father was a pioneering civil rights advocate for the African-American and Jewish communities in Central New Jersey. At the age of 23, after graduating from Yale University, Ranzini convinced Bank One Corporation to lend $3.2 million to a newly formed corporation of which he was president the monies necessary to buy a bank in a leveraged buyout, assisted by his father. He then became the youngest bank holding company president in the US in July 1988. Ranzini has received national media attention from NPR and The New York Times for his role in founding faith based lender UIF, a subsidiary of University Bank, which serves the large number of Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, and Christian customers who wish for religious reasons to avoid paying or receiving fixed interest contracts. University Bank’s faith based lending program has been highlighted by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and by the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond. University Bank received the American Bankers Association's 2009 Community Bank Award for its achievements related to this innovative program. Ranzini graduated Magna Cum Laude from Phillips Exeter Academy in 1982, and had the following honors: Honor Society, 1982; Recipient of Negley American History Prize; Westinghouse National Science Talent Search, Semi-Finalist. Ranzini graduated from Yale College in 1986, earning a BA with a Double Major: East Asian Studies and History. While at Yale he was involved in many extracurricular activities including serving as Co-Founder and Founding Publisher, 1986, of The Yale Herald; Co-Founder and Founding Editor-in-Chief, 1984–1986, Yale Business Bulletin; and Chairman and Managing Director, 1984–1986, Yale College Student Investment Group. Ranzini served as the President of the Yale Alumni Association of Michigan, from October 2003 to January 2009, and as one of the 350 Delegates to the Yale University, Assembly of Yale Alumni, from August 2004 to June 2007. Under his leadership, the bank in 2009 had a regulatory and compliance issue in which it was ordered by the Federal Deposit Insurance corporation and the Michigan Office of Financial and Insurance Regulation to cease and desist conducting business with the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication system, which is used to communicate with foreign financial entities. The regulators cited that there was reason to believe that the Bank had engaged in unsafe or unsound banking practices and had violated laws, rules, or regulations that included, among others: operating the bank with an ineffective system of internal controls, operating the bank without an effective anti-money laundering program, operating the bank with management whose practices have resulted in numerous violations of laws and regulations and contraventions of policy, operating with a high level of adversely criticized assets, operating with inadequate earnings, operating with management whose policies and practices are detrimental to the bank and jeopardize the safety of its deposits, and operating with an inadequate internal audit policy. The FDIC & OFIR Order was terminated by the agencies on March 16, 2010. On September 11, 2014, Ranzini was ordered to personally pay the Treasury of the United States $105,000 as a civil money penalty without admitting or denying any violations of law, unsafe or unsound practice. He was also forbidden from being reimbursed by his insured depository institution for this payment. Ranzini served as the U.S. delegate to UN CEFACT TBG5, from April 2003 until July 2011 and during that time served thrice as a U.S. Delegate to the International Organization for Standardization global standards setting body for financial services, ISO/TC 68, from June 2004 to June 2007. He was a member of ANSI ASC X9 from April 2004 to September 2011. He has been a member of the Federal Reserve System's Remittance Coalition since its founding in 2011. In July 2015 the Federal Reserve System appointed him as one of only five bank executives nationwide to the Federal Reserve System's Secure Payments Steering Committee, which is designing the new Federal Reserve Real-Time Payments System.
