Treasury fines Bank of America $1.2 billion over anti-money-laundering failures

The Treasury Department announced more than $1.2 billion in penalties against Bank of America on Tuesday for years of failures to report suspicious transactions and to address shortcomings in its anti-money-laundering programme, Axios reported⁵. The department said the action includes the third-largest penalty in its history⁵, a description the BBC also carried². Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said financial institutions are on the front lines of protecting the country’s economic and national security^3,4, and that the actions send a clear message that even the biggest financial institutions are not above the law⁵.

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency imposed what Comptroller of the Currency Jonathan Gould called its biggest civil money penalty assessed against a bank, France 24 reported⁶. Banking Dive put the combined figure at $1.21 billion and also attributed comment to Gould⁷. Separately, ScanX reported that Bank of America paid $11.66 million to settle alleged breaches of sanctions administered by the Office of Foreign Assets Control⁸. Reuters framed the case as a failure to police suspicious activity rather than a finding that the bank laundered money itself⁴.

Why it matters to investors

Axios said the civil action came less than a week after federal regulators fined American Express $350 million over similar failures to detect and report suspected money laundering⁵. Two superlatives sit in the same week: the Treasury’s third-largest penalty on record and the OCC’s largest civil money penalty against a bank^5,6.

ScanX raised the question of whether the involvement of Russia and Belarus in the sanctions violations could lead to stricter secondary sanctions or to enhanced due diligence requirements for cross-border business⁸. The findings are the agencies’ own; the Associated Press, Reuters and the Washington Post all report them as the Treasury’s account of the bank’s conduct^1,3,4.

What to watch

The published figures do not agree to the decimal: Axios and the wires say more than $1.2 billion while Banking Dive says $1.21 billion, and the sources do not reconcile the difference^5,7.

None of the reports in this pack sets out a remediation timetable, a monitorship, or any admission by the bank^1,7. Nor do they give a share price reaction, though France 24’s account refers to the stock without completing the point⁶.