Squawk on the Street · Oct 14, 2026 · 43m · 36m saved
With Brian Moynihan, Chairman and CEO of Bank of America · Brent Thill, AI, Software and Internet Analyst at Jefferies
Treasury fined Bank of America $1.2 billion for anti-money-laundering failures the day before the bank reported its third quarter.
Brian Moynihan, chairman and CEO of Bank of America, told CNBC's Leslie Picker on Squawk on the Street that the fine has not knocked the bank off its plan. Regulators said it failed to report more than $5 billion in suspicious transactions, and its shares fell about 8% on the day. Brian pointed instead to the consumer and commercial businesses that make up most of its earnings.
"The main street businesses, frankly, outperformed our peers." — Brian Moynihan
Brian runs what he calls the largest small-business lender in the country, and a bank whose business lines earned $8 billion in the quarter. The same hour of the show carried Brent Thill, the Jefferies analyst who covers AI, software and internet stocks, on Meta's Muse shopping agent.
The full episode is covered here so you can skip it. 43 minutes of audio, 7 minutes of reading.
Here are the 8 numbers that matter.
Key Takeaways
Bank of America is already paying $200M-plus a quarter to fix its anti-money-laundering reporting, inside its normal expenses
Brian is "not concerned" about being named by both Treasury and the OCC on the same morning
Trading slowed because clients froze when rates jumped, not because Bank of America lost share
Growth guidance rose from 5–7% to 8%-plus, which Brian called the core of the company kicking in
Bank of America wants a human to approve any AI agent that moves money out of a customer's account
It added about 1,000 contractors to patch AI-era vulnerabilities
A third of websites block Meta's Muse agent today, and Brent Thill expects most to accept agents within 3 to 5 years
1. Fixing the Fine's Causes
Treasury announced a $1.2 billion penalty the morning before the interview. Regulators said Bank of America failed to report more than $5 billion in suspicious transactions, and that the failures continued after a 2024 consent order, a formal agreement with regulators to fix the problems.
Brian Moynihan says Bank of America has added thousands of staff and lowered its reporting thresholds
"We put lots of resources against this... thousands of extra teammates." — Brian Moynihan
A new consent order brings in outside consultants to review transactions back to 2022. Brian would not rule out further findings from that review. He said the bank is "confident that we are on the right course to remediate everything."
Bank of America is spending more than $200 million a quarter on the fix, already inside its regular costs
Brian said the extra remediation spending is running through the bank's baseline expenses rather than arriving as a one-off charge. Savings elsewhere in the company have paid for it.
