During a more-than four-hour oversight hearing of the nation’s largest banks today, Rep. Trey Hollingsworth (R-Ind.) commended the 727,000 workers employed by the firms—as well as the 2 million employees working in the U.S. financial services industry—for their efforts during the pandemic.
Amid fears of bank branches shutting down, capital raises being threatened and loan processing coming to a halt, Hollingsworth noted that bank employees “got up and they went to work. Whether that was going to work at a branch, going to work at a call center, or going to work at their kitchen table, your employees, like the millions who work in financial services, made sure that they showed up for America.”
The COVID-19 healthcare crisis “didn’t become a financial crisis, because when Americans called those bank employees, they picked up the phone,” Hollingsworth added. “When Americans went to the drive-through, those employees were on the other side of the glass. When Americans opened their apps, those apps connected.”