How Debanking Took Hold Inside the Biggest Banks

Only two years ago, the idea that some Americans were being “debanked,” or cut off from financial institutions after being deemed politically incorrect, extreme, or dangerous, was often dismissed as a conspiracy or an accident.

But federal regulators announced on Wednesday that they had reached a very different conclusion: Debanking really did happen.

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) said that nine of the nation’s largest banks, as measured by assets, had policies in place between 2020 and 2025 that may have influenced their decisions to “deny or limit access to financial services” to customers or potential customers “based on their political or religious beliefs or lawful business activities.”