Bank of America ate a $1.21bn fine and admitted it

The bank admitted it willfully violated the Bank Secrecy Act, which is the part that should worry shareholders more than the number itself. FinCEN's $1.2 billion assessment is the third-largest penalty in Treasury history, and the OCC added a separate $750 million, its largest civil penalty ever, as detailed in the Treasury's announcement. Regulators say Bank of America failed to flag more than $5 billion in suspicious transactions on time, over $1 billion of it tied to Chinese money-laundering networks and trade-based laundering through the southwest border. That is not a rounding error in a compliance budget. The real cost lands later: expect an independent monitor, years of remediation reporting, and every other large US bank quietly re-checking its own SAR backlog this week.