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Bank of America is changing its customer agreement in a way that would take away a basic consumer right and make it harder for customers to take the bank to court when they are harmed. Starting May 18, Bank of America’s new Online Banking Service Agreement adds a forced arbitration clause that pushes customer disputes out of the public court system and into a private process designed by corporate fine print. It also blocks customers from joining together in class actions, making it far harder to challenge widespread misconduct. For nearly 17 years, Bank of America customers had the ability to take the bank to court. That policy followed a major antitrust settlement after some of the country’s biggest banks had colluded to force consumers into arbitration and block class actions. More than a decade ago, the terms of that settlement expired. Bank of America could have rushed back to forced arbitration then. Instead, it kept honoring the policy and continued letting customers access the public court system. And during that same period, Bank of America did just fine. The bank remained one of the largest financial institutions in the country, continued serving tens of millions of customers, and continued making massive profits. Bank of America does not need forced arbitration to survive.
Forced arbitration is a corporate shield. It lets big banks push disputes into a private system they know how to navigate, while customers are left fighting alone, often over harms too small to bring one by one but devastating when repeated across millions of people. That is exactly why class actions matter. When a bank charges illegal fees, mishandles accounts, enables fraud, discriminates, or harms customers in the same way at scale, people need the ability to join together. Forced arbitration makes that harder by design. Bank of America’s new policy also gives customers only a narrow window to opt out. Most people will never see the fine print. Many will not understand that their legal rights are being changed. And by the time they realize what happened, it may be too late. Bank of America has already proven it can operate without forced arbitration. It has done so for nearly 17 years while continuing to profit. Now customers, advocates, and the public need to make it clear that BofA cannot quietly strip away consumer rights just because it thinks it can get away with it. Thank you for standing up for consumers and corporate accountability. - Tom Tom Feltner (he/him)
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