Nine of the nation’s largest banks limited, or encouraged others to limit, financial services based on customers’ personal, political or religious beliefs, according to a report released Oct. 14 by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC).
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The OCC launched its investigation in September 2025 to determine whether banks were “debanking” customers over their beliefs. The 47-page report follows President Donald Trump’s executive order “Guaranteeing Fair Access to Banking for All Americans,” which directed federal banking regulators to review past and present unfair banking practices based on beliefs or political stance and to identify the institutions at fault.
Comptroller of the Currency Jonathan V. Gould discussed the findings. The report is based on about 50,000 bank documents and nearly 100,000 customer complaints filed between 2020 and 2025. It found that JPMorgan Chase Bank, Bank of America, Citibank, Wells Fargo Bank, U.S. Bank, Capital One, PNC Bank, TD Bank and BMO Bank used what the OCC called “ambiguous reputation risk policies” to limit or encourage the limitation of services.
A ministry’s story
Indigenous Advance Ministries is one Christian ministry affected by debanking. The ministry works to raise the next generation of faithful believers in Uganda by supporting Christian families, caring for vulnerable and orphaned children, and providing vocational training and mentorship to young adults.
IAM opened its Bank of America account in 2015. In 2023, it began receiving emails saying its accounts would be closed within 30 days. The ministry’s objectives had not changed since it opened the account, yet Bank of America said IAM “no longer align[ed] with the bank’s risk tolerance” and cut it off.
IAM turned to Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a legal advocacy organization. The ministry’s case helped lead to a pioneering Tennessee law, signed in 2024, that prohibits debanking over religious, environmental, political or cultural reasons.
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Not an isolated case
IAM is not the only Christian organization to be debanked, and many spoke out years before the report’s release.
Sam Brownback, former U.S. ambassador at large for international religious freedom, filed a complaint with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission after JPMorgan Chase debanked his organization in 2022. Last year, Decision magazine wrote about Christian debanking, including the cases of evangelist Nick Vujicic, who was targeted for his pro-life views, and Family Council, a conservative education and research organization in Arkansas. JPMorgan Chase debanked both in 2019.
What the report found
The OCC’s report showed how bank employees treated customers who did not hold “mainstream” views as high risk. One employee closed a customer’s account because the customer was a “[r]ight wing religious conservative non profit with strong anti LGBTQ rhetoric.” TD Bank’s reputational risk committee considered another organization a threat because of its pro-life views shortly before an election year.
According to the report, one tool used for debanking was WePay, a payment processor JPMorgan acquired in 2017 that is no longer available. Until 2022, WePay’s terms of service said it would not work with any businesses involved in “hate, violence, racial intolerance … or items or activities that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others regarding the same.” The OCC found that WePay screened customers’ transactions to identify supporters of Make America Great Again (MAGA) or similar movements. WePay considered that a violation of its terms and promptly removed them from its services.
The report also described cases involving groups on the political left. Capital One initially denied financial services to an organization that supported “reproductive rights, including abortion access,” though it later agreed to enter into a card relationship with the organization. The bank also denied services to an unnamed public education organization that supported Democratic candidates.
The report also cited the influence of outside advocacy groups. In one instance, bank employees refused a foundation a line of credit because one of its founders “funded several Christian conservative groups, including several identified as hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center.”
In another, Wells Fargo influenced an independent sales organization to debank merchants over their political stance. Wells Fargo also gave that organization evidence of a nonprofit’s position on same-sex marriage to ensure the nonprofit was debanked. It later encouraged the organization to use the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Anti-Defamation League and BloodMoney.org to determine what qualifies as hate speech.
Reaction
Some banks have said they intend to change. JPMorgan said in a statement: “We take this seriously, learned from it, and improved the way we do business. We agree with the Administration on a broader point: years of operating in a regulatory environment that often second-guessed decisions contributed to a culture of caution across the banking industry. That system needs fixing.”
Wells Fargo and Citibank did not issue their own statements. They pointed instead to a statement from the Bank Policy Institute, which said: “The banking industry supports fair access to banking services and has been working to ensure that government regulations and policies enable banks to serve law-abiding customers.” The statement adds that the industry supports “clear and consistent standards that promote access while maintaining sound risk management,” which it says includes the administration’s efforts to have banks focus on financial risk rather than customers’ reputational risk.
Kristen Waggoner, ADF’s president and CEO, called the practices “a scandal” in an opinion piece for WORLD. “This trend of banks discriminating against clients based on their political or religious views is a scandal,” she wrote. “The idea that powerful corporations can threaten the basic functioning of a Christian ministry, without giving any serious explanation or recourse, should alarm every American.”
Jeremy Tedesco, senior counsel for ADF, said in a statement: “No one should be denied access to basic financial services because of their political or religious beliefs. The report detailed how big banks have used vague ‘reputational risk’ standards to punish and cancel accounts of faith-based nonprofits … As the report made clear, debanking inflicts ‘real-world harm to customers and prospective customers’ like Indigenous Advance, whose Ugandan employees were forced to wait on delayed paychecks because of Bank of America’s decision to abruptly cancel the nonprofit’s accounts.”
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