Comment by roenxi

> ... [debanking] often gets conflated with declining to open an account for a person or a business ...

A reasonable perspective. But the obvious follow up is what one pithy word should be used to describe this activity? The proffered terms (offboarding, derisking) are being suggested by the industry with an obvious political motive to minimise the significance of what they are doing.

There is an ongoing war against the pornography industry that has been waged in part through payment processing. The entire thing is an intense mish-mash of poverty, wealth, politics, drama, technology and major social forces clashing with each other. It isn't appropriate to talk about that sort of action in bland terms. There is an attempt being made to sculpt society by leveraging the financial system. The implementation details of that isn't "offboarding" or "derisking" - it is much more in the spirit of a word like "debanking".

I'm with the activists on this one. It makes more sense to redefine the word debanking to cover politically motivated (or even motivated by business-logic) denial of a bank account. These are not bland administrative decisions.