A federal bank regulator says Citibank turned away a firearms-industry company that wanted help going public because the company's gun-sale policies did not match the bank's own rules on magazine size and buyers under 21. The finding is in a 47-page report the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency released October 14 on the nine largest national banks, and it says all nine had policies that restricted access to financial services for certain customers between 2020 and September 2025.

What the OCC says it found about gun businesses

The OCC's release lists firearms or ammunition manufacturing or distribution among the sectors banks restricted, next to coal, oil and gas, tobacco and digital assets. The review followed President Trump's August 2025 executive order on fair banking, and the agency says it went through nearly 100,000 complaints and about 420,000 pages of bank documents.

On page 27 of the report, the OCC writes that several banks restricted financing to firearms manufacturers or retailers, and that at least two cited "polarizing" or "polarized" public opinion on gun ownership and gun control. One bank wrote that an association with firearms makers and retailers "could result in significant [f]ranchise risk, particularly when those firearms are associated with civilian gun violence." That bank then tied its relationships to the sellers' adherence to its own "best practices."

The Citibank IPO that never got help

The report names Citibank on pages 30 and 31. A customer that owned a firearms-industry company asked for help with an initial public offering. Citibank's environmental and social risk policy at the time barred new relationships with customers whose policies did not match its "responsible firearm standards," including "limitations on the sale of high-capacity magazines and restrictions on firearm sales to individuals under the age of 21."

The OCC says the customer believed its policy complied with applicable law. Citibank denied the transaction anyway. Citibank declined to comment and pointed reporters to a Bank Policy Institute statement, CBS News reported.

Small gun makers got a no, big ones got a letter of credit

The report's sharpest complaint is about who got hurt. At JPMorgan, the OCC says a reputation-risk office told staff "Do not proceed - restricted per [Heightened Risk Sector] Framework" on a small firearms manufacturer, even though the bank found no negative news, the owners' background search came back "clean," and online reviews were positive (page 33). In 2024 JPMorgan declined merchant processing for an existing client expanding into modern sporting rifles "due to the client being a firearms manufacturer" (page 34).

TD Bank's example is starker. Its business line sought a loan of less than $50,000 for a company that makes civilian parts for modern sporting rifles, and reputation-risk staff advised against it. About four months earlier, the OCC says, TD's reputation-risk committee had endorsed possible financial guarantees for a large multinational firearms manufacturer, which later got a multimillion-dollar letter of credit tied to a foreign defense ministry contract (page 34).

Wells Fargo staff reviewing a firearms-industry prospect in 2024 called lending to the industry "a controversial and highly partisan issue" and wrote that "[u]nder the Biden administration, banks could face greater supervisory pressure to move away from lending to the firearms industry" (page 32). That is a bank talking about its own regulators, quoted by the OCC.

Trump gear showed up in the same report

The report also describes a JPMorgan-owned payment processor, WePay, closing the account of a merchant selling Trump and MAGA merchandise in February 2021, and in September 2021 another selling "conservative/republican t-shirts, hats, etc." (page 19). An example list of screening terms WePay used, the OCC says, included "MAGA," "Make America Great" and "America First" (page 18).

JPMorgan told CBS that its policies prohibit discrimination based on political or religious views and that WePay's processes "did not meet our expectations. We identified it, corrected it, and the business no longer operates."

What is still unproven, and what comes next

No bank has been fined or sanctioned, the Deseret News reports. The OCC admits it could not quantify the full extent of debanking across the nine banks, and the report says banks revised or removed many industry restrictions, including on firearms, in recent years (page 42). The OCC adds it cannot say with confidence that they will not return. One firearms item cuts the other way: when a customer asked why a bank declined card purchases of guns, an employee blamed a policy that did not exist. The bank's fraud models had flagged the transactions.

Comptroller Jonathan Gould said, "I am not confident that they will be enough," and the agency will weigh further rule changes, per Banking Dive. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau said it will "fully investigate whether the institutions featured in OCC's report and others have complied with federal consumer financial laws." An investigation is not a finding.

For gun owners, the practical stake is who can open a shop, process a card or raise capital without a bank deciding the product is too controversial. Citibank's own policy, as the OCC quotes it, set magazine and under-21 sales standards for a company that said it was following the law. Regulators now have to decide whether banks get to keep doing that.

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