One day early in the summer of 2012, two men in crisp business attire were talking about plastic debit cards at the Manhattan office of a financial services company. The men were interested in negotiating a deal to launch a debit card line. They assured the company that they would have a cooperative bank to go along with the cards eventually.

The two men were not, however, financial industry insiders trying to make a buck. Despite their suits and their surroundings, they were outsiders: activists who were part of one of Occupy Wall Street’s alternative banking groups.

A strand of Occupy is setting up a financial services cooperative. Last month, the Occupy Money Cooperative incorporated and launched its Web site. It will take its first step in the real world by issuing a prepaid bank card shortly that will most likely cost ninety-nine cents, or less, to purchase and serve as a kind of alt-checking account for activists, Occupy supports and, perhaps most important, people excluded from the mainstream banking system. Right now, it’s a small operation—there’s the board and then a group of eight members, all working part-time.

While these financial services bear the name Occupy, its backers are far from the shaggy activists that were once the Fox News stereotype. Occupy, in this case, consists of bankers and even a diplomat. In fact, some are so “inside” the system they are rebelling against that they have insisted to journalists that they remain anonymous lest they lose their jobs. And that is why they have been able to use the technical language of financial services insiders while leveraging outsider identities, values, ideas, and goals. Christian Brammer, a 52-year-old financial consultant on the founding board of the group, worked for Deutsche Bank Group for almost 16 years, for instance.

“It was a pretty nice career,” said Brammer, of his years at Deutsche (he now works as a financial consultant). His reasons for joining the Occupy Money Cooperative were clear, though. “The industry has changed a lot. Bankers forgot that their economic role in society is a utilitarian one. Payment systems shouldn’t cost huge amounts for people.”

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