Bank of America agreed to pay more than $1.2 billion in penalties on Tuesday after federal regulators found the bank willfully violated anti-money-laundering law for years, failing to flag billions of dollars in suspicious transactions that regulators said included potential ties to Chinese money-laundering networks, narcotics trafficking and sanctioned entities.
The Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) imposed a $1.2 billion penalty, the third-largest in the agency's history behind only Binance's $3.4 billion settlement in 2023 and TD Bank's $1.3 billion fine in 2024. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency separately levied a $750 million penalty — the largest in that regulator's history — which will be credited against the FinCEN assessment rather than stacked on top of it. The Office of Foreign Assets Control added a further $11.6 million for 475 apparent sanctions violations tied to Russia, Iran and other restricted programs.
Years of uninvestigated red flags
Regulators said Bank of America failed to properly monitor trillions of dollars in transactions and did not report more than $5 billion in suspicious activity in a timely way, including over $1 billion connected to national-security and other priority illicit-finance risks. As part of its settlement with FinCEN, the bank admitted it willfully violated the Bank Secrecy Act, acknowledging an inadequate anti-money-laundering program, missed due diligence on certain foreign accounts, and failures to file required suspicious-activity reports.
Treasury officials were pointed in their criticism. "Even the biggest financial institutions are not above the law," Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in announcing the action, while Comptroller of the Currency Jonathan Gould called the bank's response to previously identified deficiencies "unacceptable." The penalties follow a cease-and-desist order the OCC first issued in December 2024, after flagging significant compliance gaps as early as 2023; regulators said Bank of America had still not made sufficient progress by the time of this settlement.
Financial crime compliance is serious, and we are responsible for getting it right.
Bank of America spokesperson
The bank said it has spent billions of dollars on compliance technology and staffing in recent years and has made "substantial progress" against the issues regulators identified, while committing to complete the required remediation, which includes an independent third-party review of previously undetected suspicious transactions and additional outside assessments of its sanctions and anti-money-laundering controls.
Wall Street's reaction split between concern over the conduct and relief that the cost is, for a bank of BofA's size, manageable. "A black eye" but a "digestible" one-time charge, is how Wells Fargo analyst Mike Mayo described the settlement, according to reporting on the fine. Bank of America shares fell about 1% in premarket trading and extended losses to more than 2% after Tuesday's close.
The penalty arrives just as Bank of America reports third-quarter results: the bank said the $1.2 billion charge is non-tax-deductible and will cut net income by roughly 17 cents per share for the quarter, a direct hit to earnings that investors will be weighing alongside the bank's underlying trading and lending performance this week. It also raises the question of what further scrutiny other large banks may face, coming just days after American Express agreed to pay $350 million over similar anti-money-laundering shortcomings.