FTC Chairman Andrew N. Ferguson has sent letters to four major financial services providers warning them that they may not engage in debanking—disqualifying potential and current customers from receiving services based on religious, or political views.
The letters were sent to the CEOs of PayPal, Stripe, Visa, and Mastercard and cite publicly reported instances of debanking by PayPal and Stripe.
Ferguson’s letters cite an Executive Order that President Trump signed on August 7. That order, “Guaranteeing Fair Banking for All Americans,” prohibits financial institutions of any size from denying services to individuals or businesses based on political or religious beliefs, orientation, or lawful industry involvement.
The Executive Order directed banking agencies to adopt policies to ensure that financial institutions do not use reputational risk as a basis for restricting access to banking services.
Several financial regulators have taken action to delete reputational risk from their policies. The Federal Reserve Board announced last year that it would eliminate reputational risk as a component of examination programs in its supervision of banks. It has subsequently requested comments on a proposed rule that would codify the removal of reputational risk from all of its supervisory programs.
The NCUA has also issued a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) to codify the elimination of reputational risk from its supervisory program, becoming the latest federal financial regulator to do so.
In March 2025 the OCC began removing references to reputation risk from its handbooks and guidance documents. The agency said at the time that it also was developing a rule that will delete reputational risk references from its regulations. In October 2025, the OCC and FDIC issued a joint NPRM
The FDIC Board considered a final version of the rule at its April 7 meeting and voted unanimously to approve the final rule.
“Full participation in commerce and public life necessarily requires that law-abiding individuals can access, and freely participate in, our financial system,” Chairman Ferguson wrote, in the letters to the four financial services providers.
“It is inconsistent with American values to deny law-abiding individuals the ability to run their legitimate businesses and feed their families because they attracted the ire of rogue American officials, overzealous activists, or, more worryingly, foreign governments seeking to control public discourse,” he continued.
The letters warn the companies that any act or practice to de-platform customers or deny them access to financial services that is inconsistent with the terms of service or a customer’s reasonable expectations could violate the FTC Act and lead to an FTC investigation and potential enforcement actions.
Presumably, the reference to the FTC Act in the letters is to Section 5 of that Act which proscribes “unfair and deceptive” acts or practices. While the FTC has previously taken the position that discrimination is considered an “unfair” act, that theory is untested in court. The CFPB’s initiative under Director Chopra to characterize discrimination as a violation of its authority to proscribe “unfair” acts or practices under its UDAAP provision failed in court.
The District Court relied upon the “major questions doctrine” in invalidating the CFPB’s position:
The major questions doctrine is a principle which states that courts will presume that Congress does not delegate to executive agencies issues of major political or economic significance. The “major questions doctrine” is derived from the Supreme Court opinion in FDA v. Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp. (2000): “[W]e must be guided to a degree by common sense as to the manner in which Congress is likely to delegate a policy decision of such economic and political magnitude to an administrative agency.” It was relied upon in a recent Supreme Court opinion in State of W.VA v. the Environmental Protection Agency, where the Court “recognize[d] that sweeping grants of regulatory authority are rarely accomplished through ‘vague terms’ or ‘subtle device[s].’ Courts must ‘presume that Congress intends to make major policy decisions itself, not leave those decisions to agencies.’ If that major questions canon applies, ‘something more than a merely plausible textual basis for the agency action is necessary. The agency instead must point to clear congressional authorization for the power it claims.” The doctrine was also relied upon in Biden v Nebraska, where the Court likewise recognized that “the economic and political significance [of the agency’s forgiveness of federal student loans] is staggering by any measure” and that “the basic and consequential tradeoffs” that are necessarily part of the action “are ones that Congress likely would have intended for itself.”
Under the circumstances, it may be that the FTC will consider debanking to be unfair and deceptive to the extent that it targets individuals or companies engaging in protected speech or otherwise exercising their constitutional rights.