From e-cigarettes to abortion rights: A look at how big banks made debanking calls

A merchant selling MAGA gear, a religious nonprofit with public views on same-sex marriage, and an abortion rights group whose political donations went overwhelmingly to Democrats.

These were some of the current and prospective customers that the nation's largest banks denied services to, according to a report released this week that offers more details on how political and religious views influenced banks' risk assessments behind closed doors.

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), which reviewed roughly 50,000 documents from nine large US banks, found that lenders sometimes relied on reputational concerns rather than outright financial risks when deciding whom to bank. Regulators said a range of industries were targeted, including oil and gas exploration, coal mining, firearms manufacturing, detention facilities, and tobacco and e-cigarette retailers.

The report shed further light on how those decisions played out, including disrupting a religious nonprofit's fundraising process and eliminating a merchant's access to payment services.

The OCC stopped short of determining that the individual cases violated federal law. Federal protections against political discrimination in banking vary.

In the months following the Jan. 6 Capitol riots in 2021, a payments processor owned by JPMorgan Chase closed the accounts of two different merchants selling Donald Trump and MAGA gear after concluding that the products promoted hate, violence, or racial intolerance.

Months later, it did the same to another payments processor after the event organizer "called President Biden and Dr. Anthony Fauci 'the enemy' and characterized Black Lives Matter as Marxists" on social media. Employees for WePay and JPMorgan decided the posts were an "incitement of hate," according to the report.

"[T]here is no set criteria to indicate if A, B, or C word is found to be considered as hate or racism or terrorism, etc," a JPMorgan risk employee later noted. The account closure was ultimately reversed.

A JPMorgan spokesperson said the process used by WePay, a payments technology company it acquired and has since shut down, "did not meet our expectations."

"We identified it, corrected it, and the business no longer operates," the bank said in a statement, adding that its policies prohibit discrimination based on political or religious views and that the report highlighted "a limited number of historical interactions among the nearly 90 million customers and small businesses we serve."

While the OCC's findings offer more examples of conservatives encountering so-called debanking issues, the report also highlights that those difficulties weren't exclusive to right-wingers.