The U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned Bank of America on October 13, 2026, for more than $1,210 million, a penalty it describes as the third highest in the department's history and the largest economic sanction the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency has ever imposed. The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network concluded that the bank's violations of the Bank Secrecy Act were deliberate, not the product of mere oversight.
FinCEN's investigation found that Bank of America failed to report approximately $5,000 million in suspicious transactions. Of that total, more than $1,000 million was tied directly to national security risks, including Chinese money laundering networks and illicit financial flows along the southwest border, according to the findings behind the sanction.
Despite the scale of the failures, the resolution imposes no asset caps and no restrictions on the bank's commercial operations. The OCC, which issued the administrative order in October 2026 after already handing the bank a cease order in 2024, described the lapses as a "widespread collapse of its internal controls." No criminal charges were filed against executives, no external monitor was installed, and no changes to the board were required.
A standard the bank once demanded of others
The outcome sits awkwardly against a moment from December 2023, when the U.S. Senate Banking Committee questioned Wall Street executives on anti-money-laundering practices. Senator Elizabeth Warren asked whether crypto companies should be held to the same anti-money-laundering rules as traditional banks. Bank of America chief executive Brian Moynihan answered in a single word: "Absolutely."
That same month, Binance was fined $4,300 million, expelled from the U.S. market, placed under an external monitor for five years, and its founder, Changpeng Zhao, was sentenced to four months in prison. Bank of America's penalty is almost four times smaller, and comes without any of the structural consequences that followed Binance's settlement.
U.S. authorities have drawn a distinction between the two cases, noting that Binance processed transactions involving sanctioned entities, while Bank of America's violations stemmed from detection and reporting failures. For European observers of crypto regulation, the gap in consequences between a bank found to have deliberately failed to report billions in suspicious activity and an exchange penalized for similar sums offers a direct point of comparison on how the same underlying conduct, laundering exposure and sanctions-adjacent risk, is treated differently depending on the type of institution involved.
Expansion into tokenized assets continues
The fine has not slowed Bank of America's push into digital assets. The bank has appointed Sonali Theisen to lead its global digital assets platform, with a mandate covering tokenized deposits, custody and settlement. The bank's planned tokenized deposit network is intended to offer instant settlement 24 hours a day, linked to the CHIPS and RTP payment networks, which together process more than $2 trillion daily. The network is expected to begin operating in 2027.
