> The reason the banks, and through the banks OnlyFans, attack sex is because they are accountable, and don't wish to take risks unless they are very profitable risks.
One is the higher incidence of chargebacks. You don't have to ask if something is naughty -- just look for the chargebacks and it'll tell you. What happens is someone charges a thing, their partner sees it on the CC statement and asks about it, the first person is ashamed to admit it so they act shocked and insist it MUST be fraud because THEY would never charge something like that, and to keep up appearances, they call the bank and have the charge reversed. And platforms have to build in large margins to cover for it, or screw creators out of their payouts, or sometimes both and keep the difference.
(Which is why something irreversible, like cryptocurrency, keeps getting talked about. It wouldn't solve the shame problem, but it would eliminate chargebacks, and creators would just get paid. It just brings a bunch of other problems.)
The second is extremely vocal pressure from some fringe religious groups, who will pump the bellows of the CSAM-PR-disaster furnace for anyone who allows a nipple on their platform. You don't know the groups' names, but you've seen the hit pieces they put in the press. Look up "Exodus Cry" for one.
While there is no law on the books that says banks can't do business with OnlyFans, there are laws ( BSA comes to mind ) that in effect create incentives for banks to 'derisk' problematic customers. Some get branded high risk based on internal and industry standards.
This is the reason. Sex work is a crime so banks can’t offer banking services and sex work-adjacent businesses (like strip clubs) tend to be high-cash businesses so they’re considered high risk for money laundering. This means the entirety of adult entertainment gets bucketed as “high risk” even though technology has, in theory, significantly changed the actual money laundering risk presented by these businesses.
Also, the type of people who are typically sitting in the meetings who would have to sign off on changes to these long-held banking “truisisms” haven’t given it a second’s thought and they really don’t care to re-examine their beliefs anyway.
If there's a chargeback, someone has to cough up the X dollars that the cardholder spent and return it them. That typically isn't the bank. But it also requires Y dollars of overhead to work on the issue until it's resolved.
The cardholder calls their bank (the issuing bank) on the phone, and right away the bank has spent money answering the call.
After the bank tells the merchant that a chargeback is happening, the merchant can dispute the chargeback (make their case that it was a legit purchase), which the bank has to adjudicate.
Credit card processing is a high-volume, low-margin business. The bank's cut is roughly 2-3% of the purchase. For a $10 purchase on OnlyFans, the bank is only making like 20 to 30 cents off that transaction. If a chargeback happens, the required manual work will cost them many times that. So, in order for it to be profitable, banks need chargebacks to be rare. If they're frequent, it's less profitable or even unprofitable.
This is exactly the case.