‘BlueAnon for banking’: How left-wing activists use a backdoor to keep millions unbanked

Left-leaning advocacy groups have found a backdoor way to kill banking access for millions of Americans: burying federal regulators in coordinated, astroturfed comment campaigns.A collection of progressive nonprofit groups appears to have found a formula beyond traditional lobbying to achieve their policy goals: hijacking federal regulatory comment periods. In an effort to block approvals they view as nefarious, these groups have launched coordinated campaigns that astroturf comments to regulators and build a talking-points echo chamber designed to grind approvals for novel banking providers, known as “fintechs,” to a halt. The financial consequences for hundreds of thousands of Americans could be dire.The U.S. financial services market is projected to grow to $132 billion by 2032, yet millions of Americans still live in what are known as banking deserts. Traditional bank branches have fallen from more than 100,000 in 2011 to 81,000 in 2025, and Federal Reserve researchers say 4% of U.S. census tracts, mostly rural and suburban, qualify as banking deserts. A new wave of fintech providers has moved to fill that void. The 2023 FDIC National Survey of Unbanked and Underbanked Households found 4.2% of Americans were unbanked, down from 8.2% in 2011, partly thanks to companies such as SoFi that started with loans and expanded into traditional banking.But breaking into banking isn’t simple. Prospective banks need approval from the Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, a process that includes a public comment period. Federal rules require the OCC to allow 30 days for comment on expedited charter reviews, then 15 more days before deciding; standard charters get 120 days total. Regulators can extend that timeline if commenters show they need more time, or if legal, policy, or compliance issues surface. But the OCC is also required to keep an expedited review on track if it finds that objections are frivolous or filed simply to cause delay.That’s the crack consumer groups have learned to exploit. Grassroots-aligned coalitions appear to be aggressively working the process, largely from the premise that for many Americans, no credit is better than credit they consider too expensive.Dozens of consumer advocacy and left-leaning groups complained to the OCC in 2020, when fintech lender Oportun applied for a bank charter, citing a ProPublica and Texas Tribune investigation into the company’s practice of suing delinquent borrowers. The groups called it predatory, even though the sued borrowers represented under 6% of Oportun’s loan holders. The Center for Responsible Lending and California Reinvestment Coalition told the OCC that Oportun’s litigation was “prone to evoke pronounced fear” in the Latino community it primarily serves, warning of chilling effects tied to immigration enforcement. A related letter, also signed by Consumer Reports, LULAC, and the Public Good Law Center, called the tactic “terrorizing” for undocumented borrowers required to appear in court.CRL and CRC filed the core opposition record, while a broader sign-on letter, backed by groups including NCLC, UnidosUS, U.S. PIRG, and the Woodstock Institute, recycled the same talking points to manufacture the appearance of a wide coalition. The resulting media drumbeat led Oportun to withdraw its charter application altogether, a result advocates later described as a collective pressure campaign.The same playbook has surfaced against charter or deposit-insurance applications from Figure Bank, SoFi, Rakuten, and Square, and against the Capital One-Discover merger, which NCRC and 110 allied organizations urged regulators to block. Now fintechs Enova and OppFi are facing it too, with more than 100 consumer, civil-rights, and community groups pressing Congress to oppose their charter bids. Some of those groups have drawn funding from George Soros’s Open Society and the Ford Foundation.WASHINGTON KILLED 3,700 COMMUNITY BANKS — AND REFUSES TO LET TECH FIX ITPatrick Brenner of the Southwest Public Policy Institute argues the strategy backfires on the very consumers it claims to protect.“Blocking fintech bank charters doesn’t protect underbanked Americans. It protects them from having options,” Brenner says. “A charter can mean cheaper funding, stronger federal supervision, and broader access to credit. If critics dislike the price of that credit, they should argue for changing the law, not use the charter process as a backdoor rate cap.”That’s a fair point. But regulators have so far seemed shockingly willing to entertain what one critic of the tactic called “BlueAnon, but for banking.” Whether they change course remains to be seen, and the Trump administration is on the clock, with roughly two years left to decide.Taylor Millard (@TaylorMillard) is a freelance journalist who lives in Virginia.