Bank of America was founded in 1904 -- well before credit scores became a thing -- to provide banking services to Italian-Americans, who could not usually obtain service from other banks due to ethnic discrimination.

It's also worth noting that banks couldn't operate across state lines until sometime in the 80s, so it wasn't unusual to see a lot of different smaller banks.

Which is a good example of why you need financial systems to eliminate ethnic and religious biases in lending.