Competition, Banking, and Consumer Finance: Open Markets, Safe Money, and Exit

What is broken and why it matters

What we would change

1. 1

   Stop concentration before it becomes control. Merger review should use rebuttable presumptions in highly concentrated markets, count harms to innovation, workers, suppliers, and local access, examine serial acquisitions, and require a verifiable public benefit for any claimed efficiency. Agencies need stable litigation budgets and retrospective review.

2. 2

   Open durable bottlenecks. Dominant platforms and essential financial networks should provide secure portability, documented interfaces, fair access terms, and functional interoperability when control of a gate blocks entry or switching. Duties scale with market power and risk.

3. 3

   Guarantee a safe basic transaction account. Every person should be able to obtain a low-cost, identity-secure account through participating banks, credit unions, community institutions, or a competitively contracted public fallback. It includes deposit insurance, cash access, bill pay, instant payments, and no overdraft lending by default.

4. 4

   Make financial exit fast. Customers own the right to transfer account data, recurring payments, direct deposit, and balances through a secure switch service. Consent expires, access is logged, data use is limited to the requested service, and revocation works immediately.

5. 5

   Set a fair-credit boundary. Small-dollar lenders must assess ability to repay, disclose one all-in annual cost, cap repeated refinancing, and observe a national ceiling on total credit cost. Credit unions, community lenders, employers, and the public account network should offer safer liquidity alongside that rule.

6. 6

   Modernize payments as shared infrastructure. Federal policy should expand universal access to instant account-to-account payments, require rapid availability of wages and benefits, preserve cash, and set common fraud, error-resolution, and liability rules across bank and nonbank services.

7. 7

   Let owners and managers bear failure. Deposit insurance protects ordinary depositors through transparent coverage and risk-based premiums. Resolution should impose losses on equity, management, and uninsured creditors under known rules, preserve critical operations, and publish any extraordinary public support and recovery plan.