The year 2025 saw a range of changes to financial services affecting millions of Americans. Taken together, these state and federal developments paint a picture of 2025 as a year when well-intended reforms—whether to protect borrowers, reshape fee structures, or streamline regulations—often collided with complex economic realities about how best to support financial resilience.
For many Americans, particularly those with limited savings or credit options, the result was not greater security but heightened uncertainty about where and how to access the financial tools they need.
Here’s a year-end roundup of three major lowlights and highlights for financial services in 2025:
BEST
- Increased access to private equity: Through his August executive order, titled “Democratizing Access to Alternative Assets for 401(k)s,” President Trump ensured that middle and working-class Americans in the private sector can access private equity for their defined contribution 401(k)s, not just the wealthy elite and accredited investors. Private equity refers to non-public business investments.
As the executive order noted, more than 90 million Americans participate in employer-sponsored defined-contribution plans. As the solvency of Social Security remains uncertain with automatic cuts to benefits a few years away, Trump’s move could create higher returns for workers as they plan for their final years. Stephen Moore, a Trump administration economic adviser and founder of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, shared data from 2003 to 2023, showing that returns on alternative investments in private equity have outperformed traditional 401(k) investments. - Reversal of overdraft ban: The Trump administration recently reversed Biden’s overreaching “junk fee” ban. Overdraft protection serves an important purpose: to nudge consumers and warn lenders. Overdraft protection, controversial due to fees that are not just high but often unpredictable, saw rate caps instead of transparency legislation under the Biden administration. Once again, people in the most jeopardy had fewer, rather than better, options afforded to them. Overdraft protection has compounding fees that skyrocket quickly because its purpose is to cover math errors or other accidents, which will be immediately addressed. And again, capping these rates leads to the removal of the overdraft option, not to consumer protection.
- Fair banking for all Americans: President Trump also signed an executive order called “Guaranteeing Fair Banking For All Americans,” which rolls back a previous, troubling government push against disfavored customers for their political or religious beliefs.
President Trump’s executive order references Operation Chokepoint, a dubious push by the Biden administration to coerce banks into stripping banking access away from lawful businesses that Team Biden found distasteful, from firearms to fossil fuels. In practice, that meant, as the Committee to Unleash Prosperity estimates, some 5,000 federal bank regulators “were weaponized against Biden’s enemies.”
President Trump’s executive order directed federal banking regulators “to the greatest extent permitted by law, remove the use of reputation risk or equivalent concepts that could result in politicized or unlawful debanking as well as any other considerations that could be used to engage in such debanking, from their guidance documents, manuals, and other materials.”
No matter who is in the White House, lawful Americans of all backgrounds deserve access to financial services. Kudos to President Trump for righting this wrong.
WORST
- Interest rate loan caps: At the state level, Alaska and Virginia became flashpoints in a broader national debate over how best to balance consumer protection with access to credit. In Alaska, Governor Mike Dunleavy rightly vetoed a bipartisan bill that would have capped interest rates at 36% on small consumer and business loans up to $25,000, a measure proponents argued would curb predatory lending. Supporters of the veto, including Independent Women’s Voice, praised the governor’s decision as a defense of financial inclusion, warning that a strict cap would push vulnerable borrowers into unregulated loans and worsen “banking deserts” already prevalent in many rural Alaska communities. We see that limiting risk-based lending and fintech partnerships would shrink credit options for families and small businesses who rely on them for emergencies or growth.
A similar dynamic played out in Virginia, where we also successfully urged Governor Glenn Youngkin to veto similar legislation—S.B. 1252—that would have imposed stricter rate caps and tighter rules on fintech-bank partnerships. We contended that although the bill’s intent was to protect borrowers, its practical effect would be to scare off lenders, reduce credit availability, and drive borrowers toward more expensive or unsafe alternatives. Virginians lack savings to cover unexpected bills and depend on diverse credit sources, and we made the case that heavy-handed caps would hurt those they were meant to help. - Fee caps: Meanwhile, a separate but related national debate dominated discussions in financial services circles: the future of Regulation II, the federal rule that governs debit-card interchange fees (the fee merchants pay banks when consumers use their debit cards). Trade organizations, such as the Consumer Bankers Association (CBA), argued that regulatory caps on these fees—grounded in the Durbin Amendment to Dodd-Frank—have historically reduced the availability of free checking accounts, raised monthly banking fees, and pressured banks to cut services. In 2025 debates, CBA materials and industry letters warned that proposed adjustments to the fee cap could make basic banking more costly for consumers and harm smaller financial institutions that rely on interchange revenue to cover fraud protection and other services.
Policymakers wanting to help consumers who support meddling with interchange systems risk harming the financial infrastructure that enables everyday consumers to access affordable banking services. - Exposing financial data: Unfortunately, the Biden-era implementation of Section 1033 of the Dodd-Frank Act—a CFPB rule finalized in late 2024 to require banks, credit unions, and fintechs to share consumers’ financial data—is still on the books. It is fundamentally misguided. Although the rule was marketed as a way to give consumers greater access to their own financial information, 1033 vastly overreached by compelling data sharing “regardless of cost, security, or consent,” potentially jeopardizing privacy and exposing sensitive data without adequate safeguards. The rule bans financial institutions from charging fees to offset the significant costs of building secure systems in what amounts to an unfunded mandate and raises compliance costs—ultimately borne by customers.
The Trump administration’s decision to freeze enforcement of the rule—due to a court order halting its implementation—and to reconsider or rewrite it, represents an opportunity to fix these flaws rather than let an ill-conceived regulation take effect. Regulators shouldn’t “mimic” the original rule or expand the CFPB’s authority beyond what Congress intended; instead, they should adopt a narrower interpretation of Section 1033, focus on real consumer needs, and respect market-based agreements between private companies rather than prescribe broad regulatory mandates.
Looking Forward
Heading into 2026, we at Independent Women will continue to fight for financial services policies that prioritize consumer privacy and security while avoiding costly and disruptive mandates that burden financial institutions and, by extension, everyday U.S. customers. Good outcomes matter more than good intentions.