Tillis, Thomas: hearing to order. Good afternoon and welcome to today's hearing entitled Ensuring Fair Access to Banking, Policy Levers and Legislative Solutions. I want to thank Ranking Member Cortez Masto, this is our first hearing, for working with me to hold this hearing and for the witnesses and your willingness to testify and to do the preparation that's necessary before this hearing. Law-abiding Americans and U.S. businesses deserve to be banked full-stop. Every day Americans and U.S. companies rely on core banking services, deposit taking, checking, lending and transaction processing to go about their daily lives. When access to these services are denied, not because of risk or credit worthiness or illegal activity, but because of politics, religious beliefs or involvement in a legal but disavowed industry, we have a serious problem that demands congressional action. Debanking exists for two primary, in two primary forms. The first happens in open and in an easy, easy way to spot. Financial institution initiated debanking and that occurs when a bank or a credit union voluntarily reduces or outright severs a banking relationship as a part of a political calculation or maybe from board pressure, activist board members. Often this action occurs in the face of activist pressure and U.S. energy companies, firearms manufacturers and dealers and digital asset companies have borne the brunt of this harmful practice over the recent decades. The second form, regulator initiated debanking, is more opaque and I think in many ways more sinister. Using the regulatory apparatus at their disposal, prudential regulators pressure, coerce and or direct financial institutions to terminate relationships with certain customers or industries. Infamously, Operation Chokepoint under the Obama administration saw the Department of Justice and the FDIC systematically target firearms dealers, ammunition retailers, payday lenders and other legal businesses they found politically objectionable. More recently, the Biden administration deployed a similar playbook against the digital asset industry in what many called Chokepoint 2.0. Both forms of debanking share common threads. They use our financial system as a tool to enact policy outcomes outside of our democratic process. Legal U.S. companies and their employees are harmed and public confidence that our banking system remains independent from passing political whims is eroded. These three are outcomes we should seek to prevent, not allow. That is why I released the discussion draft of the Ensuring Fair Access to Banking Act of 2025, which takes a comprehensive approach to ending politically motivated debanking. The legislation rests on three pillars. First, it establishes a strong federal fair access standard that prohibits denying core banking services based on First Amendment protected activities or the business type of a legally operating enterprise. By enacting this standard, Congress would provide regulatory clarity and uniformity for customers and financial institutions nationwide. Importantly, the bill preserves the bank's legitimate financial and risk management discretion through exceptions for safety safety and soundness, profitability considerations, risk assessment, and ongoing compliance with and soundness. existing laws and regulations. Second, my discussion draft permanently repeals the use of reputational risk in examination and supervision. By incorporating Chairman Scott's FIRM Act, we can ensure that regulators no longer use this amorphous standard to pressure banks into debanking customers that a future administration Third, the legislation implements targeted reforms to bring transparency and accountability to the examination process. It allows select members of Congress to request confidential supervisory information, giving us the ability to conduct meaningful oversight of examiner conduct. It also creates a special inspector general within the Treasury Department to receive and investigate allegations of regulatory abuse, ensuring that when examiners overstep their authority, there is a meaningful avenue for accountability. Finally, the bill modernizes outdated anti-money laundering thresholds that haven't been adjusted since the 1970s and the 1990s. These hard caps, when leisure suits were popular and gas was about 49 cents a gallon, now capture routine transactions and increase the likelihood that ordinary customers are misflagged for account closures over standard lawful activity. Taken as a whole, the Ensuring Fairness Access to Banking Act of 2025 represents a systematic approach to addressing the dual forces in debanking and regulatory levers that have enabled it to occur. Your testimony will help inform our work as we move this legislation forward. of their politics, their faith, or their profession, has fair access to banking services they need At this point, I'll turn to Ranking Member Cortez Masto.