“It’s easier to make an ideologically driven decision, to ignore the problem as it’s growing and manifesting, if you don’t have the expertise in the room,” said Alex Martin, policy director of climate finance at Americans for Financial Reform.
Americans for Financial Reform: A coalition of consumer, civil rights, labor, and business groups concerned about financial system stability and consumer protection.
While recent legislation has rolled back consumer banking protections such as limits on hidden fees, polling from Americans for Financial Reform in March 2025 showed strong bipartisan support for such regulations to remain. A Morning Consult poll from January 2025 found a majority of Americans also want to see more community banks.
As watchdog groups like Americans for Financial Reform have noted, though, industries that complain about being “debanked,” like cryptocurrency, were never systematically cut off from banks, though regulation increased after the 2022 crypto crash. When these industries did face difficulties getting access to banking services, it was more due to “banks appropriately consider[ing] the risks these businesses can pose to bank customers or the bank’s financial and operational resilience,” AFR has said.