OCC Says Nine Large U.S. Banks Used Reputation Risk Policies to Restrict Customers Over Political and Religious Views

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency has released a 45-page report on “debanking,” accusing nine of the biggest U.S. lenders of using vague reputation-risk standards to deny or limit services to customers and lawful businesses. For high-risk PSPs, the point is not the politics; it is the mechanism: when banks keep broad discretionary policies, they can cut off entire merchant categories without a clean, objective rulebook.

1. The OCC’s report, “Guaranteeing Fair Banking for All Americans,” was released Wednesday, Oct. 14, and says some of the largest banks in the United States let political concerns shape who received services. Comptroller of the Currency Jonathan V. Gould said the evidence showed the nation’s largest banks had “denied, debanked and discriminated against customers and lawful businesses.”
2. According to the report, nine banks had policies that allowed them to deny or limit services based on political or religious beliefs. The regulator said the problem was not a single bad decision here or there, but “broad reputation risk policies” that lacked clear standards and “objective, risk-based criteria.”
3. The OCC said those policies disadvantaged some Americans “based on their political, religious or social views or based on their lawful business activities.” The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau responded that it would “address any consumer harm caused by the nation’s largest banks.”
4. The banks told the OCC they have since revised or consolidated policies to make sure they granted fair access. The regulator said none of the banks have fully acknowledged earlier debanking decisions or done enough to remediate customers, which is the part that matters if you are trying to understand whether the issue has actually been fixed or merely relabeled.
5. Among the examples cited, JPMorgan subsidiary WePay closed accounts for merchants selling merchandise related to President Donald Trump and the Make America Great Again movement. JPMorgan said its policies prohibit political or religious discrimination and that WePay’s process “did not meet our expectations,” adding that it addressed the issue and has since shuttered the business.
6. The report also says debanking was not limited to conservative-focused businesses. Capital One declined to do business with an abortion rights group after finding that most of its political contributions went to Democratic candidates, and with a public education group whose political arm solely endorsed Democrats.

For PSPs and merchants in high-risk verticals, the useful detail here is the OCC’s focus on policy design: if a bank’s reputation-risk framework is too open-ended, it can become a de facto off-ramp for whole sectors, not just one awkward account. That is the real credit and acquiring question hiding inside the political noise.