AMAC members are engaged in the effort to hold big banks accountable for cancelling services to consumers and organizations who hold worldviews that the leadership of these financial institutions find objectionable. Last year, they sent JP Morgan Chase executives over 91,000 messages to help hold the bank accountable for the decision to assault the free speech rights of fossil fuel companies, arms manufacturers, and religious organizations. This assault included denying services to former Ambassador Sam Brownback’s non-profit, the National Committee for Religious Freedom.
The strategy these financial institutions use to close accounts, or de-bank, individuals and organizations who dare subscribe to a contrary, unapproved worldview includes employing vague reputational risk policies. Back in 2014, Deloitte defined reputational risk as being “risks related to ethics and integrity, such as fraud, bribery, and corruption. Next come security risks, including both physical and cyber breaches – followed closely by product and service risks…” A recent glaring example of an organization that completely mishandled its management of reputational risk and allowed it to spiral into a full-blown marketing disaster is Anheuser-Busch’s Bud Light fiasco of last year.
Today, some financial institutions have stretched the definition of reputational risk to include damage the bank perceives customers with a conservative mindset can do to the institution’s reputation, real or imagined. Unfortunately, these policies provide some cover for banks to persecute consumers on the basis of political ideology.
Pushback against these reputational risk strategies is beginning to emerge. The state of Mississippi is currently considering SB 2118, the Equality in Financial Services Act, which is legislation that according to the bill’s text, would prohibit financial institutions from “…denying financial services based on a person’s religious exercise, association, speech, social views or participation in a particular industry…”.
AMAC Action, on behalf of the over 19,000 AMAC members in Mississippi, went on the record recently to support SB 2118. We’re also working with the Alliance Defending Freedom, a leading Christian law firm dedicated to protecting religious freedom and free speech among other civil rights, to ascertain other egregious acts of persecution of conservatives by financial institutions as well as identifying bills that are similar to SB 2118 in other states.
Matt Sharp, Senior Counsel, Director of the Center for Public Policy at Alliance Defending Freedom, said this about Mississippi’s Equality in Financial Services Act, “Everyone needs access to basic financial services no matter their political or religious beliefs. Banks that are too big to fail are too big for bias. Banks should not discriminate against people because of their religious or political views. Like the racial redlining of the past, this form of discrimination creates a two-tiered society. That’s wrong, and that’s what this bill seeks to stop in its tracks.”
AMAC members have demonstrated their commitment to ending these biased banking practices and AMAC Action will continue our efforts to call out the financial institutions that practice warped reputational risk policies and advocate for strong laws that prohibit this kind of discrimination.
