Earlier writing. I wrote this during my time in financial services, and it’s left here as it was published. More earlier writing
The Most Honest Number in Your Institution Is the One You Don’t Report
Every financial institution reports the numbers that make it look good. Growth. Net income. Membership totals. Loan volume. These are the numbers on the slide at the board meeting, the numbers in the annual report, the numbers everyone has agreed to care about.
The most honest number is the one that never makes the report: who you turned away.
I’ve built the models. I know exactly what is sitting in the data that doesn’t make the deck. The decline reasons. The applications that never got finished because the process was hostile. The members who qualified for a better product and were never offered it because the model was optimized for the institution’s margin, not the member’s outcome.
This is where financial democracy lives or dies: in the denials.
A bank is honest about being a bank. It exists to make money, and it tells you so. A credit union claims something different. It claims the members are owners, that the institution exists to serve them, that surplus comes back to the people rather than out to shareholders. That claim is testable. The test is in the data you don’t publish.
The audit I would run
So here’s the audit I would run on any institution that claims to serve its community:
- Pull the declines by income band and by geography. Do they cluster in exactly the neighborhoods the charter says you exist to serve?
- Look at who gets offered the good product versus the expensive one. Is it correlated with need, or with profitability to you?
- Find the abandoned applications. A process that quietly exhausts the people with the least time and the most stress is making a decision, even if no human signed it.
- Check whether anyone in leadership has ever seen these numbers. Usually the answer is no, and that isn’t an accident.
I’m not arguing that institutions should approve every applicant. That would be malpractice, and it eventually hurts the members whose deposits fund the losses. I’m arguing for honesty. If you decline someone, own it as a decision your institution made, not as something the algorithm did to them.
Because here’s the thing about an algorithm. It reveals the bias already baked into decades of decisions, and then it scales it, quietly, perfectly, a thousand times a second, with nobody’s name on it.
The institutions that take financial democracy seriously will start reporting the honest number. They’ll do it because they understand that you can’t claim to serve a community while refusing to count who you left out.
Report the denials. Then you will know what you actually are.
