Banks have a requirement to ‘know their customers’ and to look for money laundering and the financing of terrorism. Their vigilante efforts lead to racist outcomes.
The Dutch government has been fining banks for not doing enough to combat money laundering. As a consequence, the banks have geared up their efforts to find problematic transactions and account holders, with ethnic and religious profiling as a result. If you have a non-Western migration background you have much higher chance of being checked and having to justify your income or spending.
Both Radar and Follow the Money have found a lot of examples of people who are having trouble with their bank and are quite sure it has to do with their non-Dutch sounding (whatever that might mean) name.
The Dutch Institute for Human Rights now has so many banking discrimination cases that they’ve published an analysis of the problem and a set of recommendations for banks on what they should do to about this. The Institute tells banks to invest in knowledge about discrimination, to create a strategy to find discrimination early in the process, to acknowledge that algorithms can be biased and to act on that, to facilitate a reporting hotline for discrimination, and to create a transparent selection process for investigations. The government also has a task: perform proper oversight on how the banks do this.
See: Discriminatie door financiële instellingen veelvoorkomend probleem zonder gerichte maatregelen: wat gaat er mis en wat moet er gebeuren? at College voor de Rechten van de Mens.
Image on front page from the Follow the Money article.