After the financial crisis, banks reduced risk not just by eliminating those who weren’t paying—they also were saying goodbye to scores of small businesses that had otherwise been responsible:

“It didn’t matter that JBC’s business had recovered; the decision had been made months before. The men recognized the irony. Under different circumstances, ‘we’d be aggressively pursuing you as a customer,’ one of them told Bliss. But JBC had been deemed, in the oblique vocabulary of Charter One and its parent companies, Citizens Bank and the Royal Bank of Scotland, noncore.

“The problem was not Bliss’s company but his industry and region–both of which, in an effort to stem future losses, his bank had essentially written off. Charter One, like other banks across the country, was using a sort of predictive math to sever ties with struggling borrowers before they stopped making payments. In the process, banks were abandoning businesses that were recovering, too. ‘It was a bizarre situation,’ Bliss says. ‘We were successful. It was so frustrating.'”