A sign at the Citibank branch in New York, USA on Sunday, January 12th, 2025.
Michael Nuggle | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Citigroup on Tuesday ended its seven-year-old policy restricting how it will provide banking services to firearms makers, sellers and resellers.
The bank began its policy in March 2018 after teenage shooters killed 17 people and injured more than a dozen in a mass shooting at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida that year.
At the time, Citi told his clients “we need to adhere to these best practices.” “(1) will not sell firearms to people who have not passed background checks, (2) will restrict the sale of firearms to individuals under the age of 21, and (3) will not sell bump stocks or large-capacity magazines.”
Banking policies only applied to business clients, ranging from small and medium-sized businesses to Fortune 500 sized businesses. It did not restrict how Citi’s personal bank customers used their cards. Citi says it provides banking services to more than 19,000 companies worldwide.
“As a society, we all know that we need to change something, and as a company, we feel that we have to do our part,” said Citigroup Executive Vice President of Enterprise Services and Edschuyler, Public Service, in 2018.
But Skyler says things have changed. “This policy was intended to promote the adoption of the best sales practices as a careful risk management and did not address the production of firearms,” he wrote in a blog post Tuesday that City “has no specific policy as pertaining to firearms.”
“Many retailers follow these best practices,” Skyler writes.
A March spokesman for Our Lives, a gun control advocacy group organized in part by students who survived the Parkland massacre, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Citigroup’s change has argued that amid wider political pressure on so-called “debanking,” influential technical leaders and right-wing officials have in recent years claimed that the Biden administration inappropriately blocks certain people, including cryptocurrency supporters and conservatives, from banking services.
That debate has not vanished since President Donald Trump returned to the White House. He faced the CEOs of two largest banks in the United States, Bank of America and JP Morgan Chase, in a similar complaint at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland earlier this year. Both banks said at the time they would not close their accounts for political reasons. Bank of America said: “We welcome conservatives and there is no political litmus test.”
“We have stated that we are updating our employee code of conduct and global financial access policies for our clients to make it clear that we will not identify them based on other characteristics such as race or religion,” City said on Tuesday.
Bank executives have repeatedly stated that they will only terminate their banking services if there are issues with anti-money laundering laws and client regulations, not because of political affiliation.
“We have 70 million American consumers in the bank, so the bank is open to everyone,” said Brian Moynihan, CEO of the Bank of America.
