OCC Enforcement Actions

Key dates

2024-04-01

Bank of America self-identified the inaccurate wire-transmittor information issue, according to the OCC enforcement order; the date is included as an approximate month-level historical reference represented by the first day of the month.

2024-10-01

Bank of America stopped the inaccurate transmittor-information practice in 2024; the OCC order does not provide an exact day, so this is an approximate month-level historical reference represented by the first day of the month.

2026-10-08

The OCC announced the American Express National Bank cease-and-desist order and $350 million civil money penalty.

2026-10-13

The OCC announced the Bank of America $750 million civil money penalty, described as the largest penalty in OCC history, in coordination with Treasury and FinCEN actions.

2026-10-22

The OCC published the October 2026 consolidated enforcement-actions release.

Suggested considerations

• Firms should consider reassessing whether their BSA/AML risk assessments cover the risks of all material products and services, rather than concentrating on narrower deposit activity while underweighting credit-card, charge-card, correspondent, or payment activity.
• Compliance teams may wish to test end-to-end transaction-monitoring workflows for alert generation, escalation, investigation, disposition, and SAR filing, including backlog governance, aging thresholds, management information, and evidence that suspected trade-based money laundering is escalated promptly.
• Firms should consider validating that customer identification, customer due diligence, beneficial-ownership information, and ongoing-risk-rating processes are complete, accurate, risk-based, and aligned to the institution's actual customer and product populations.
• Banks may wish to perform a targeted review of outgoing wire data to confirm that originator or transmittor names and other required fields are accurate, consistently populated, retained, and not overwritten by deficient interfaces or manual processes.
• Boards and senior management should consider documenting sufficient staffing, subject-matter expertise, training, independent testing, audit coverage, and issue-remediation ownership for BSA/AML programs.
• Institutions operating under prior supervisory findings should consider independent validation that corrective actions are complete, effective, sustainable, and supported by evidence, rather than merely implemented procedurally.
• Compliance teams should consider reviewing whether third-party, correspondent, and payment-processing arrangements create data-quality or monitoring dependencies that could delay SAR filing or impair law-enforcement traceability.

What changed

This publication announces enforcement outcomes rather than a new rule or generally applicable deadline. American Express National Bank is subject to a cease-and-desist order and a $350 million penalty for an inadequately designed and monitored BSA/AML program, inadequate resources and expertise, internal-control weaknesses, weak independent testing and training, systemic failures involving approximately $13 billion of suspected trade-based money-laundering activity, and customer identification and customer due diligence deficiencies.

Key dates

2024-12-01

The OCC issued the December 2024 cease-and-desist order requiring Bank of America to address deficient BSA/AML controls; the publication does not specify the precise day of issuance.

2026-10-13

The OCC announced the $750 million civil money penalty and coordinated action with FinCEN.

Suggested considerations

• Compliance teams may wish to perform a documented gap assessment against 12 CFR 21.21 and 12 CFR 21.11, including transaction monitoring, customer and activity risk coverage, escalation procedures, SAR timeliness and accuracy, and recordkeeping.
• Banks should consider testing whether potentially suspicious activity is consistently escalated to appropriately skilled investigators and whether alert disposition processes can demonstrate timely decisions on SAR filing.
• BSA officers and relevant personnel should consider competency-based training covering suspicious-activity identification, investigation, SAR preparation, trade-based money laundering indicators, and escalation responsibilities, with evidence of completion and effectiveness testing.
• Internal audit and independent testing functions may wish to assess whether their scope, expertise, sampling, issue validation, and reporting are capable of detecting systemic BSA/AML weaknesses rather than merely confirming policy existence.
• Management and boards of directors should consider reviewing BSA/AML remediation governance, resourcing, milestones, risk acceptance, issue escalation, and the treatment of repeated or overdue corrective actions.
• Banks with material trade finance, correspondent banking, card, payments, or cross-border activity should consider targeted testing for trade-based money laundering typologies and transaction-monitoring coverage gaps.
• Institutions operating under a consent order or cease-and-desist order should consider independently validating that remediation is complete and effective, rather than relying solely on management representations or closure of project milestones.
• Compliance teams may wish to compare their control framework with the broader market reading of the action: industry reporting characterized the case as a record penalty driven by systemic and longstanding failures, while professional commentary on the evolving BSA/AML framework emphasizes the distinction between establishing an effective program and maintaining it in operation.

What changed

The publication is an enforcement action, not a new generally applicable rule or safe harbor. It establishes a major OCC enforcement precedent that persistent failures to implement an effective BSA/AML program after a formal supervisory order can result in exceptionally large penalties, including where deficiencies affect transaction monitoring, SAR escalation and filing, personnel competence, training, and audit effectiveness.

Key dates

2026-10-08

The OCC announced the cease-and-desist order and $350 million civil money penalty against American Express National Bank; the Federal Reserve announced a coordinated action against American Express Company and American Express Travel Related Services Company.

Suggested considerations

• Compliance teams may wish to reassess whether the BSA/AML risk assessment accurately reflects the institution's largest and most complex products, customer segments, payment flows, geographies, channels, and transaction types, rather than relying primarily on deposit-account risk.
• Firms should consider testing whether customer identification, customer due diligence, beneficial-ownership information, and account-risk-rating processes provide sufficiently complete and reliable data for transaction monitoring and suspicious-activity reporting.
• Banks may wish to conduct a targeted lookback for trade-based money-laundering indicators in card, merchant, payment, cross-border, and related repayment activity, including activity involving insiders or connected accounts, and document escalation and reporting decisions.
• Compliance teams should consider validating that monitoring scenarios, alert thresholds, investigative workflows, case-management controls, quality assurance, and SAR filing processes can identify and report suspicious activity within applicable regulatory timeframes.
• Boards and senior management may wish to review whether BSA/AML staffing levels, expertise, reporting lines, technology, data governance, and independent-testing coverage are proportionate to the institution's size, complexity, and risk profile.
• Firms should consider strengthening role-based BSA/AML training for employees, directors, and senior management, with evidence of completion, competency, and periodic refreshers.
• Internal audit or another suitably independent function may wish to perform end-to-end testing of risk assessment, customer due diligence, monitoring, investigation, SAR decisioning, and governance controls, with tracked remediation and board-level reporting.
• U.S. banking organizations may wish to compare their programs against the OCC's findings and the market commentary emphasizing that the principal lesson is product-risk misalignment and the need for enterprise-wide controls, not merely remediation of isolated monitoring alerts.

What changed

This is an enforcement action and supervisory precedent, not a new generally applicable rule. The OCC required American Express National Bank to remediate a BSA/AML program that was not reasonably designed to assure and monitor compliance with the BSA and its implementing regulations. The findings specifically reinforce expectations that risk assessments cover the institution's actual product mix, including credit and charge cards; customer identification and customer due-diligence procedures support effective monitoring; transaction-monitoring and suspicious-activity reporting processes...