Household Access to Banks Has Improved, FDIC Says

Most of the decline reflected improvement in the circumstances of households that didn’t previously have bank accounts, the FDIC said. Unemployment is strongly correlated with lack of access to banking services and had fallen to 50-year lows before the pandemic sent the U.S. economy reeling this year.

Officials warned that the economic disruption caused by the pandemic is likely to derail the trend of rising access to banking services. The U.S. jobless rate stood at 7.9% in September, more than double its year-ago levels.

The reason for not having a bank account most frequently cited by respondents in the FDIC’s survey was inability to meet minimum balance requirements. Many of the nation’s largest banks charge monthly fees unless customers maintain several hundred dollars or more in their accounts.

Black and Latino households are significantly more likely to be unbanked than white households, the survey showed. The unbanked rate for those groups in 2019 was 13.8% and 12.2%, respectively, versus 2.5% for white households.

The FDIC survey, titled “How America Banks: Household Use of Banking and Financial Services,” was conducted in June 2019 and collected responses from nearly 33,000 households.

Write to Paul Kiernan at [email protected]