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Treasury hits Bank of America with $1.2 billion fine a day before earnings beat. FinCEN's $1.2 billion penalty is the third-largest in its history, behind only Binance's $3.4 billion and TD Bank's 2024 settlement. The OCC separately levied its own largest-ever civil fine against the bank: $750 million. Regulators found Bank of America failed to flag more than $5 billion in suspicious transactions, including money tied to Chinese laundering networks and the southwest border. Treasury announced the penalty a day before Bank of America was scheduled to report third-quarter earnings. The Treasury Department announced on October 13 that its Financial Crimes Enforcement Network had fined Bank of America $1.2 billion. The agency said the bank violated anti-money laundering and sanctions laws, according to reporting from CNN, NBC News and the Washington Post. FinCEN's finding was blunt: the bank failed to report more than $5 billion in suspicious transactions on time, including over $1 billion connected to what the agency called priority national security risks - Chinese money laundering networks and illicit finance moving along the southwest border. It's the third-largest penalty FinCEN has ever handed out, trailing only the $3.4 billion Binance paid in 2023 and the $1.3 billion TD Bank penalty in 2024. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency assessed Bank of America $750 million, which the OCC says is the largest civil penalty the agency has ever issued, and FinCEN credited that amount toward its own penalty. The Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control added a smaller but pointed piece too: an $11.66 million settlement over 475 apparent sanctions violations. The bulk of them, 403 payments worth about $14.3 million, were routed through blocked banks, most of them under Russia-related sanctions, according to OFAC. Put the pieces together and Bank of America is facing more than $1.21 billion in penalties from a coordinated Treasury action, not a separate $750 million OCC add-on on top of FinCEN's penalty. The OCC didn't soften its language. It called Bank of America's compliance program "deficient and ineffective," pointing to a systemic breakdown in the bank's policies and processes for identifying, evaluating and reporting suspicious activity. According to the OCC's order, the bank's transaction monitoring system lacked appropriate thresholds for triggering case investigations in the first place: red flags simply never became alerts. The OCC rejected Wise's national trust bank charter on July 23, 2026, citing persistent AML failures and management's inability to handle money-laundering risks. Wise shares dropped 11% on the news. The company plans to reapply under the GENIUS Act stablecoin framework, but its compliance record travels with it. - Wise money laundering compliance denial - fintech bank charter rejection reasons This isn't Bank of America's first brush with regulators over the same problem. The OCC issued a cease-and-desist order in December 2024, demanding the bank fix gaps in its due diligence process and bring in an independent consultant for lookback reviews. Regulators noted this time that those earlier fixes didn't stick. You don't get hit with the third-largest FinCEN fine in history by missing one report. You get there by missing the same category of report for years, across multiple supervisory cycles, after being told to fix it. Compare that to how other big banks have handled similar failures. HSBC paid $1.9 billion in 2012 after letting roughly $8 billion move through its accounts for drug cartels and sanctioned regimes over seven years. Wachovia, now folded into Wells Fargo, paid just $160 million in 2010 despite enabling an estimated $390 billion in cartel-linked transfers - a number that looks almost absurd next to the penalty. Bank of America's $1.2 billion FinCEN fine sits in between those two cases in dollar terms. But in what it says about institutional pattern, it sits closer to HSBC: not a single lapse, but a programme that kept failing the same way. The timing nobody can ignore. Here's the part that's hard to look past. Bank of America was scheduled to report third-quarter earnings on October 14, the day after the fine became public. Its investor relations page said results would be released at about 6:45 a.m. Eastern, followed by an 8:30 a.m. conference call. The sequencing still invites an obvious question. Banks don't control exactly when Treasury announces an enforcement action, but they do control their own earnings calendar. What the timing really shows is something simpler. Bank of America is large enough that a penalty of more than $1.21 billion can land in the same week as its earnings release without becoming an existential event. It also raises the question of whether regulators are leaning harder on banks precisely because they can afford it. Nobody at Treasury has said that explicitly. There's no evidence the size of the penalty was calibrated to the bank's earnings calendar rather than the scale of the compliance failure itself. But the October 13 enforcement headline and the October 14 earnings calendar sit side by side all the same. It's the kind of juxtaposition compliance officers at every major bank will be talking about this week, because it suggests the cost of getting caught is rising. The consent orders require Bank of America to work with a third party on a lookback for suspicious transactions that went undetected and to undergo independent reviews of its monitoring, customer due diligence, foreign correspondent due diligence and AML data governance. For a bank that's been told twice now that its transaction monitoring thresholds don't catch what they're supposed to catch, the next supervisory cycle is the one that actually matters. FinCEN estimated its mixing rule alone would have cost 15,000 institutions a combined 1.47 million compliance hours annually, a burden the agency cited in scrapping both proposals on October 6. - FinCEN withdraws crypto mixing rules in October - regulatory changes to cryptocurrency unhosted wallet requirements Join the discussion. No replies yet. Start the discussion. Julian Lim is an entrepreneur, technology writer, and a researcher. He started JL Data Analysis after graduating from NUS in Intelligent Systems. Julian writes about technology innovations and entrepreneurship on Business Times, Asia Pacific Magazine and occasionally contributes to Startup Fortune.

Wise Group hires former NICE chief Barak Eilam as next chair. Published on 10/13/2026 at 07:56 am EDT Alliance News (Alliance News) - Wise Group PLC on Tuesday announced the appointment of Barak Eilam as non-executive director & chair designate, succeeding David Wells. The London-based money transfer services provider said Wells will step down as chair and as a director in April. He joined the company in 2019 as a non-executive director and became chair in 2021. Eilam, who will also be chair of Wise's nominating and corporate governance committees, "is a highly experienced technology executive and board director with nearly three decades of experience building and scaling global technology businesses," Wise said. The company noted that Eilam worked at Nasdaq-listed cloud platform provider NICE for 25 years, including serving as chief executive officer from 2014 to 2024. "He brings both deep operational and board-level experience, currently serving on the boards of FactSet, CCC Intelligent Solutions, Similarweb and, previously, Payoneer," Wise noted. "Barak brings a rare combination: years of hands-on experience building and scaling enterprise technology, and a track record of partnering with companies on their long-term strategy," Wise Co-Founder & CEO Kristo Kaarmann commented. "I've been impressed by what he built at NICE over 25 years - joining as an engineer and transforming it into a global cloud enterprise software leader. "That operator mindset, combined with his board experience at fast-growing public companies, makes him an exceptional partner and chair as we continue to build 'the' network for the world's money." Kaarmann added that when Wells joined Wise, "we had six million customers. "Today we serve nearly 19 million customers and some of the largest banks in the world. Under his chairmanship, we scaled our impact for people and businesses globally and became a dual-listed company." Eilam, meanwhile, commented: "Wise is one of the most distinctive and important technology companies in global financial services. The team has built an extraordinary business...combining a strong customer proposition with a technology-driven and highly-scalable model. "I see a significant opportunity ahead to build on that foundation, expand Wise's impact globally, and create substantial long-term value for customers and owners. I'm excited to work with the board and leadership team as Wise enters its next phase of growth." Wise shares were up 0.1% at 919.02 pence on Tuesday in London. By Emma Curzon, Alliance News reporter (C) Alliance News - 2026

Wise links to domestic systems for cross-border QR payments. Oct 8, 2026 4 hours ago A visitor to Brazil may want to sample food sold by local street vendors, but they may not be able to pay using the country's popular method: Pix, the QR-based instant payments network. It's a common pain point for travelers worldwide, and one that international transaction payments platform Wise aims to address by adding cross-border QR payments to its app. The company plans to integrate with domestic payment schemes that have gained traction in several markets, including Pix, Singapore's PayNow, Hungary's Qvik, and QR Ph in the Philippines. Wise has also partnered with Alipay+ to expand QR payment coverage across popular tourist destinations in Asia. The arrangement lets customers pay directly from their existing Wise accounts through local QR systems, rather than having to rely on cards or cash. Creating walled gardens. QR payments can reduce friction at checkout, while the networks behind them facilitate real-time settlement at relatively low cost. That combination has helped drive the rapid adoption of real-time payments in markets such as India and Brazil. But because many of these systems were built primarily for domestic use, they can create walled gardens that make cross-border transactions more difficult for travelers and merchants. That has prompted a growing number of efforts to connect these systems. For example, global payments gateway Alipay+ recently expanded its platform to Latin America. The integration is designed to allow visitors to make QR-code payments at participating merchants using the wallets they already use at home. The importance of tourism. China has also been working to improve payment connectivity across Southeast Asia. The widespread use of localized digital wallets and super apps like WeChat Pay and Alipay has created a similar challenge for travelers visiting the region. As part of those efforts, China recently connected Indonesia's Quick Response Code Indonesian Standard (QRIS) with major payment ecosystems, including Alipay and UnionPay. The connection allows consumers in the region's largest digital economy to scan QR codes and pay using familiar apps while transacting in local currencies. All these developments underscore the importance of tourism and cross-border commerce to economies around the world. As more countries adopt domestic real-time payment systems, connecting those networks across borders could become an important part of the payments landscape. Disclaimer: This story is auto-aggregated by a computer program and has not been created or edited by finopulse.