Citigroup on Tuesday ended a seven-year-old policy restricting how it provides banking services to firearm manufacturers, sellers and resellers.
The bank launched the policy in March 2018 after a teenage gunman killed 17 people and injured more than a dozen in a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, on Feb. 14 that year.
Citi said at the time that it would require clients to “adhere to these best practices: (1) they don’t sell firearms to someone who hasn’t passed a background check, (2) they restrict the sale of firearms for individuals under 21 years of age, and (3) they don’t sell bump stocks or high-capacity magazines.”
The bank’s policy applied only to its business clients, ranging from small businesses to Fortune 500-sized companies. It did not restrict how Citi’s personal banking customers used their cards. Citi says it provides banking services to more than 19,000 companies globally.
“As a society, we all know that something needs to change. And as a company, we feel we must do our part,” Citigroup Executive Vice President of Enterprise Services and Public Affairs Ed Skyler said in 2018.
But Skyler says things have changed. “The policy was intended to promote the adoption of best sales practices as prudent risk management and didn’t address the manufacturing of firearms,” he wrote Tuesday in a blog post announcing that Citi “will no longer have a specific policy as it relates to firearms.”
“Many retailers have been following these best practices,” Skyler wrote, “and we hope communities and lawmakers will continue to seek out ways to prevent the tragic consequences of gun violence.”
A spokesperson for the March for Our Lives, a gun-control advocacy group organized in part by students who survived the Parkland massacre, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
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The change at Citigroup comes amid broader political pressure over so-called “debanking,” with influential tech leaders and right-wing officials having alleged in recent years that the Biden administration was improperly blocking certain people, including cryptocurrency proponents and conservatives, from banking services.
That argument hasn’t gone away since President Donald Trump returned to the White House; he confronted the CEOs of America’s two largest banks — Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase — with similar complaints at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, earlier this year. Both banks said at the time that they would never close an account for political reasons. Bank of America said, “We welcome conservatives and have no political litmus test.”
Citi said Tuesday that it would “update our employee Code of Conduct and our customer-facing Global Financial Access Policy to clearly state that we do not discriminate on the basis of political affiliation in the same way we are clear that we do not discriminate on the basis of other traits such as race and religion. This will codify what we’ve long practiced, and we will continue to conduct trainings to ensure compliance.”
Banking executives have repeatedly said they terminate banking services only when there are issues with anti-money laundering laws or know-your-client regulations, not because of political affiliations.
“We bank 70 million American consumers so our bank is open to everybody,” Bank of American CEO Brian Moynihan later said.
