| First, Why they exist: Banks share data with these services, so that all banks can mitigate risk. Effectively, with all the banks providing information about their customers they can determine “future credit worthiness”. It’s gone a bit further now and merchants can report you not paying and banks encourage every more data collection. Banks that didn’t / don’t do this kinda of background check are actually breaking the law (KYC - “know your customer” - at least since 9/11, possibly before). As you could be providing funds to a terrorist (and that’s highly illegal). To summarize, through regulation the government has strongly encouraged if not outright required these firms to exist. To answer they question why haven’t disbanded them, well we don’t have the means to. Banks fund / elect politicians and if you step out of line (as kanye west did recently), they’ll debank and “cancel” you. Some politicians will push back on this; but it is rare and most have independent support (base, external large donor, ete) |