Following this announcement, the Senate Banking Committee held a hearing on what is commonly referred to as debanking, focusing on hearing testimony from subject matter experts and business owners who claim they were unfairly denied access to banking products.
In addition, multiple Senior Republicans and Democrats also agreed that banks and their regulators may be improperly denying services to some clients, but disagreed on the root cause.
According to information provided by Reuters, Republicans trained much of their ire towards regulators, who argued that restrictive rules and oversight discouraged some banking activity for several industries, such as firearms manufacturers and cryptocurrency firms. At the same time, Democrats have focused on industry missteps and argued that they show the need for robust watchdogs, as there were thousands of complaints collected in recent years in a regulatory database, from individuals who were not allowed to open accounts or had their accounts abruptly closed.
In addition, the banking industry has resisted accusations that it denies services based on ideological reasons. It also argued that onerous, outdated, and opaque rules make it difficult for financial institutions and their regulators to provide services in certain situations, as well as to explain the overall reason they cannot meet the customers’ needs.
Included in the witnesses who testified are officials of Anchorage Digital, a crypto platform that says it has been debanked, and Old Glory Bank, a bank that was established in 2022 that brands itself as a response to multiple debanking complaints about larger lenders.
The dispute drew headlines in January 2025, when President Donald Trump accused Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase of not providing banking services to some conservatives. The financial institutions responded by declaring they do not refuse services on political grounds.
At the same time, the overall industry is currently prepping a fresh push for clearer rules, arguing for a clear national standard on fair access to financial services, clarity around AML laws that can force banks to close accounts, as well as streamlined bank supervision in order to help firms better understand who they can provide services. According to officials of the Brookings Institutions think tank, banks are required to report to the government any cash transaction that would currently be over USD 75.000, adjusted for inflation. Banks also rapidly escalated the number of reports they filed with regulators to flag suspicious activity, in compliance with AML rules, as they filed 288.000 reports in 2003 and 2.5 million in 2023.
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