We put it in front of Meridian in April. They came back in six weeks and we started work in July, fourteen months after they declined us.

And then Hannah — who by then reported to Samuel and not to me, which is the reason she was able to say it — came into my office and said, “We should give it away.”

We published it in September. Ninety-four pages, redacted, as a template, with a fillable index and instructions, free, on the firm’s site.

It has been downloaded four thousand one hundred times.

Eleven people have written to tell me it worked. One of them was a man in Ohio whose ex-wife had opened nineteen accounts in his name in 2013 and who had not been able to get a job in banking for a decade.

That is the single best thing I have ever done and it began with a bank telling me no.