This page collects a lot of dirt on consumer banks that’s useful for ethical consumers.
Credit Unions invest money into the respective communities they serve and of whom their members comprise.
yeah, credit unions are less likely to have unethical investments. But they bring a separate set of problems. Since they are small they struggle to profit, so they cut corners by outsourcing everything, like the website, the app, printing checks, printing statements, bill pay, etc. Credit unions have become helpless with all the outsourcing of quite trivial tasks. So they all outsource to the same 1 or 2 suppliers for each service. Then you find that a handfull of giant corporations end up seeing the data of all credit union customers. In effect, a credit union is just a proxy brand of giant corporations. Many credit unions now expose their customers to Cloudflare.
So you basically have to choose between shitty investments (commercial banks) or privacy compromises (credit unions as proxies for giants).
I pulled my checking and savings from banks because of those to whom they were denying services.
The larger credit unions may be worth a look: they often develop their own tools in-house. Navy Federal CU, Alliant CU and Lake Michigan CU come to mind: the latter two have backdoors to membership. All three have A or A+ health rankings from DepositAccounts.com
I would immediately nix Alliant CU and Lake Michigan CU because their website goes through Cloudflare. So they are not financed well enough to secure their own website. The biggest web-centralizing tech giant in the world is Cloudflare. Those two CUs use Cloudflare in a way that excludes people arbitrarily, which makes them overly exclusive.
Navy FCU blocks Tor users from applying. That’s not as bad as using Cloudflare, but KYC rules do not require knowing a customer’s IP address so Navy FCU disrespects privacy enough to not have my respect. It also bothers me that if you click on “Eligibility” at the bottom of the landing page, it directs to a page that says nothing about eligibility and only pushes an arbitrary ad. That’s not really something to be non-transparent about. People need to know if they are wasting their time before they apply, particularly if they have no connection to the Navy.