Triad Business Bank Responds to M&F’s October 19 Statement

The agreement says M&F Bank "will cease to be an independent bank." The meeting moved, but the facts didn't. M&F's Board decided the bank was finished. A new day is here, and Triad is just getting started: it responds to M&F's October 19 statement, corrects the record on its proposal, and keeps M&F alive for its shareholders, employees, customers and North Carolina.

GREENSBORO, N.C., October 22, 2026--Triad Business Bank (OTCID: TBBC) today responded to M&F Bancorp, Inc.'s October 19 announcement that it has adjourned its shareholder meeting to November 4, will describe Triad's proposal in a proxy supplement, and has determined not to engage with Triad.

"The agreement says, in its own words, that M&F Bank 'will cease to be an independent bank' on the day the deal closes," said Jonathan Lee Kelly, a director of Triad. "Just like Nehemiah 5:9, I have to say, 'The thing that you are doing is not good.' The Optus agreement kills Mechanics & Farmers Bank, and no description of it as a rescue changes what it does.

"And let me say the other thing plainly, because M&F keeps implying otherwise: under Triad's proposal, Mechanics & Farmers Bank remains a minority depository institution in North Carolina, with a majority African-American board of directors written into the charter. Under the Optus agreement, North Carolina will no longer have any African-American MDI, and our birthright is passed to private shareholders in another state.

"The Board decided the bank was finished. But it's plain as day to shareholders, employees, customers, and North Carolina that you don't kill a bank to save it!"

Five lessons from Parrish Street that can save M&F on November 4

Durham's Parrish Street was called Black Wall Street because of what two institutions did there. North Carolina Mutual, founded in 1898, and Mechanics and Farmers Bank, chartered in 1907, took the savings of a community no other bank would serve and put them back into that community as mortgages, business loans and payrolls. Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois both came to see it. The lessons they saw are the ones M&F's Board has set aside.

First: you don't kill a bank to save it. M&F stayed open through the Great Depression when banks around it did not. It survived because the people who ran it refused to let it end, not because they found someone to end it on better terms. The agreement before shareholders kills M&F Bank as an independent institution on the day it closes. That is not what Parrish Street did when things were hard. It is the opposite.