President Donald Trump’s push against U.S. debanking of controversial industries such as digital assets has led to a new report from the Office of the Controller of the Currency further confirming past practices and warning of potential punishment for the banks allegedly involved.
The OCC is instructing banks to heed President Donald Trump’s executive order issued in August, which called for banks to stop and punish those who unfairly cut off legal customers from the banking system. Trump’s order had required regulators to investigate firms under their supervision guilty of debanking and go after them “including the levying of fines, the issuance of consent decrees or the imposition of other disciplinary measures against any financial institution subject to the jurisdiction of such federal banking regulator.”
In the OCC brief, which examined nine of the largest U.S. national banks, the OCC concluded that “between 2020 and 2023, the banks maintained public and non-public policies that restricted certain industry sectors’ access to banking services, including by requiring escalated reviews and approvals before providing access to financial services.” It said some of the big banks raised more difficult entrances for controversial or environmentally sensitive businesses or on activities that conflicted with the bank’s own values.
The banks — including financial giants JPMorgan Chase & Co., Bank of America and Citrigroup Inc. – highlighted with links to their own past public policies, particularly on environmental issues.
“The OCC intends to hold these banks accountable for all illegal banking activities, including by referring to the Attorney General,” the report said, although it is unclear what specific laws the activity may have violated. While Trump’s previous executive order cited laws governing unfair competition in commerce, the first among them exempts banks. It also cited a law against unfair consumer practices.
But the report made no such citations, and an OCC spokesman did not respond to a CoinDesk request for information on how legal violations could be forwarded for prosecution.
Already at the end of Trump’s previous term, the OCC, under his watch, had quickly finalized a rule that would have forced banks to measure every potential customer on measurable risk factors, instead of rejecting entire categories of business, such as firearms manufacturers, adult entertainment, payday lenders, coal mines or crypto companies. But that was pushed aside at the start of former President Joe Biden’s administration, leaving the question open.
Instead, that report referred to OCC bulletins, the agency’s work to attack “reputational risk” as a consideration in overseeing financial institutions and Trump’s order. The presidential order is not itself a law, but was a directive from Trump to his administration’s regulators, not the banks directly.
Although Republican lawmakers and conservative groups have pushed for a pushback against the kind of debanking that crypto companies and their leaders have condemned, the OCC’s report did not take enough responsibility to please everyone.
“While the OCC broke down debanking cases, it failed to mention some of the most well-known causes of debanking,” Cato Institute Policy Analyst Nicholas Anthony said in a statement. “The report criticizes banks for cutting ties with controversial customers, but it does not mention that regulators explicitly assess banks on their reputations.”
Last week, Republicans in the House of Representatives released a report implicating US banking regulators in the debanking saga of recent years.
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