Sponsors (95)
Introduced February 5, 2025 by Garland H. Barr · Last progress February 5, 2025
The bill increases access and legal protections for lawful individuals and businesses by restricting arbitrary de‑banking and deplatforming and strengthening enforcement, but it raises compliance, litigation, and operational risks for banks and networks that may be passed on to customers and could create legal and systemic uncertainty for large institutions.
Lawful individuals and businesses (including small businesses, low‑income people, immigrants, and middle‑class families) will have broader, fairer access to bank accounts, ACH, card acceptance, loans, and payment services because banks, card networks, and large institutions would be restricted from arbitrary de‑banking or deplatforming.
Merchants and lawful sellers gain stronger protection against being cut off by card networks, preserving the ability to accept card payments and avoid sudden disruptions to commerce.
Banks will be encouraged to use impartial, quantitative, risk‑based standards for customer decisions, which could improve safety and soundness and reduce practices that concentrate systemic risk.
Banks, card networks, and covered credit unions will face increased compliance, monitoring, documentation, and litigation costs to meet impartial/empirical standards and disclosure requirements, costs that are likely to be passed on to consumers, merchants, and taxpayers through higher fees or reduced services.
Limiting institutions' discretion to decline customers for non‑financial or reputational reasons could complicate anti‑money‑laundering, sanctions and fraud controls and may increase exposure to illicit actors or legal risk for banks and payment networks.
Conditioning access to emergency liquidity, deposit insurance, or imposing penalties on very large banks for discriminatory practices risks destabilizing a covered institution and could produce broader contagion if applied in crisis scenarios.
Based on analysis of 8 sections of legislative text.
Prohibits large banks, covered credit unions, and card networks from denying services to lawfully compliant persons for political/reputational reasons and creates civil remedies and regulatory penalties.
Prohibits very large banks, certain credit unions, and payment card networks from refusing to provide financial services to persons who are complying with the law on the basis of political or reputational risk. The bill conditions access to some Federal Reserve facilities and deposit insurance procedures on institutions’ refusal-to-do-business practices, bans covered institutions from using the ACH network for such refusals, creates a federal private right of action with treble damages and fee shifting for denied customers, and authorizes civil penalties against payment card networks for improper blocking.