Banking Deserts Now Growing As Activists Block Fintech Access

Most of us are familiar with the comment periods generally put out by any government body when they produce a proposed new regulation, a change to an existing regulation, and so on. It's a mechanism intended to give stakeholders, people who will have to abide by and work within the new regulation, a chance to put their two cents in and, in theory, to make sure that any new rules will have the intended effect.

The same process also applies to what are known as novel banking providers, or fintechs, which include uninsured state, territorial, and tribal banks, trust companies, and federal branches of foreign banks. But now some activists on the left are using these comment periods to try to delay or deny the approval of new fintechs, in a back-door way of restricting these institutions. 

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.

That could end up being a real problem, as traditional banks are proving insufficient for the nation's anticipated banking needs in the next few years. But that doesn't matter to the "progressive" groups.

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.

Here's how the leftist activists are trying to stop these new financial institutions:

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.

Aye, that's the rub. This is how the activist left always works: There is a need in a marketplace, a need for higher-risk borrowers, for example, or people who lack access to a big national bank, or people who for any reason might choose to do business with a tribal bank, a trust company, or perhaps the United States branch of a bank that they did business with in their home country. The left simply doesn't trust people to make their own decisions; as noted, they honestly think no credit is better than credit they disapprove of.

This has the possibility of denying people financial services they may not be able to obtain otherwise; credit cards, auto and home loans, you name it. The activists that are using this back-door approach to halting these institutions don't care about that, any more than they care about financially-impaired elected officials like the perennially-ignorant Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and her constant attempts to interfere with the country's financial system, a system about which she talks a lot but gets it right not even 1/1024th of the time.

That's why this isn't surprising. The left is always all about choice, until someone makes a choice they disagree with. 

Editor's Note: The Democrat Party has been infected by socialism, and it's spreading FAST. Democrats are claiming there's nothing to worry about, but we know the truth.

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