Banking Access in Boston
Explore Bank On Boston's interactive Banking Access Map to see where financial services are located in the city of Boston.
The Bank On Boston Coalition has created the Banking Access Map to display the locations of institutions offering different financial services - including banks, credit unions, check cashing facilities, foreign money transfers, and ATMs - within the city of Boston. This interactive map indicates which of the banks and credit unions offer products that meet the Bank On National Account Standards , detailing access points where low-fee accounts for low-income households are provided. The map also includes MBTA bus routes and T lines to show how easily some financial services can be accessed.
The Bank On Boston Coalition created the Banking Access map in order to visualize the state of financial services’ accessibility in Boston. We sought to compare the locations of institutions that can offer safe financial services - like banks and credit unions, specifically those which have accounts that meet the Bank On National Standards - with the locations of more predatory or costly financial services, like check cashers and foreign money transfers.
Where are financial services located in Boston?
You can explore this map by zooming in, opening up full screen view, moving the map around, searching for an address in the upper left hand box, viewing your current location with the crosshair symbol in the lower right corner, or clicking on each location to learn more information about that site.
Some financial institutions in the city offer products that meet the Bank On National Account Standards, acting as access points into banking for low-income households. Click the button below to see the institutions that offer these accounts.
Click the buttons below to see where different types of financial services are located.
The map below shows all of these different financial services together.
Banking Access in Boston
The map below shows the financial institutions - banks and credit unions - that offer products which meet the Bank On National Accounts Standards.
These accounts are reliable and accessible to low-income households, typically having features such as low costs, no overdraft fees, robust transaction capabilities such as a debit or prepaid cards, free check cashing, and online bill pay. Bank On Boston provides lists of these accounts, checking and savings , on our website.
Explore the map by zooming in, moving the map around, and clicking on the points to learn more information about these institutions and the products that they offer.
Banking Access in Boston
In addition to visualizing the locations of financial services in Boston, the Banking Access Map features demographic information for the city from the 2020 American Community Survey (ACS).
These statistics relate to race/ethnicity, household income, employment level, and nativity/citizenship status. The inclusion of these elements may reveal some inequity regarding the location of financial services in the city.
The data from the 2020 ACS is based on census tracts, which are “small, relatively permanent statistical subdivisions” determined by the U.S. Census Bureau and containing populations between 1,200 and 8,000 people ( United States Census Bureau ).
Click the buttons below to see the corresponding ACS statistic on the map, then scroll down in the legend to see an explanation of the data.
You can then explore the map as you did above.
This data shows the percentage of each census tract's population that does not identify as non-Hispanic white.
This data shows the percentage of individuals within each census tract's population who are not U.S. citizens. A limitation of this data is not that undocumented non-citizens may not be represented.
This data shows the percentage of households in each census tract who earn less than $75,000 in annual income.
This data shows the percentage of the labor force within each census tract's population who are currently unemployed.
Additional Resources
You can find more information about Bank On Boston, finding secure low-fee accounts, and other financial resources on our website .
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation's (FDIC) Survey of Household Use of Banking and Financial Services is another helpful tool to learn about the current state of bank account access and usage.
Sources
The location data for each type of financial service was collected between March-May 2022. The data was initially sourced from the Boston Planning and Development Agency (BPDA) Research Department, which compiled data from DataAxle, Google, Yelp, and YellowPages. The bank locations were sourced from the FDIC's BankFind Suite , which provided a full list of FDIC-insured banks and their branches. We excluded wealth management firms, banks only offering business accounts, private/investment fund banks, or mortgage lenders from our map data. A similar list was sourced from the National Credit Union Administration’s (NCUA) database of insured credit unions. Both the bank and credit union data was cross-referenced with information on the institutions' websites. For check cashers and foreign money transfers, we utilized the Massachusetts Division of Banks’ publicly available spreadsheets which list each company and all its locations that have obtained state licenses for check cashing and foreign money transactions. Finally, we also requested and received data from the DOB about bank-owned and non-bank-owned ATMs.
The demographic data was sourced from the 2020 American Community Survey with the assistance of the BPDA Research Department.
