This study examines three community development banks (BCDs) from São Paulo, linked to the housing movement in its first months of existence (from June 2009 to December 2011) and it was based on the perspective of the actors involved . A process of dissemination of community banks has began since 2004, led by leaders of the first institution of its kind in the country, the Banco Palmas, founded in 1998, in Fortaleza (CE), and by the National Solidarity Economy (SENAES ). There are few studies on community banks and a few scattered about the contingencies during the process of adoption of these banks. This paper aims to address this gap. The paper concludes that in the case of three community banks in São Paulo, linked to the housing movement, there are contingencies in two levels of implementation. The first one is characterized by the relations between the coordinators of community associations of construction, which support the bank managers, credit analysts and bank tellers, and residents of housing estates where banks are entered. The contingencies at this level of implementation are: the conflict between the community association building’s agenda and the community bank’s agenda, the conduct of activities by workers and managers of banks whose focus is not the community bank and the work intensity of the credit agent. At the second level of implementation, characterized by the relation between the actors that induce the adoption of community banks and coordinators of community association, managers, credit analysts and bank tellers, we have identified the following contingencies: a number of existing obstacles to the manager network of correspondents and the set of obstacles generated by problems occurring in the model of vertical induction. The strategies adopted by banks studied to counter such contingencies has been the pursuit of a partnership with an institution geographically closest (that partnership has not consolidated by the end of the period analyzed), obtaining resources and managing the network of correspondent, for one hand, and waiting for additional resources, based on the model of vertical induction, for other hand.