Bank of America Chairman and CEO Brian Moynihan joins CNBC's Squawk on the Street for an exclusive interview on October 14, 2026, discussing the bank's third-quarter results, regulatory challenges, and the outlook for Bank of America.
The interview comes as Bank of America (BAC) shares face significant selling pressure, with CNBC showing the stock down more than 7% during the broadcast.
Moynihan addresses the bank's regulatory situation, including a fine exceeding $1.2 billion, and discusses the challenges of reaching an agreement with regulators.
He also expresses confidence that Bank of A...
What Brian Moynihan said
Written from the verified transcript and checked against it. Every figure links to the moment it was said.
Brian Moynihan, CEO of Bank of America, addressed the $1.2B+ fine and stock drop, explaining that the bank has invested heavily in remediation, lowered reporting thresholds, and is confident in resolving the issues. He noted that expenses for the resolution are baked into run rate, with $200 million incremental costs in the current quarter. Moynihan dismissed concerns about the Trump administration, citing strong earnings and customer activity. He attributed the trading underperformance to fixed income mix and client freeze during rate increases, while highlighting $5 billion in trading revenue and 17 quarters of growth. He reaffirmed achieving a 16% return on tangible common equity ahead of schedule, with net income growing $400 million per quarter. He discussed AI risks, emphasizing human-in-the-loop for money movement and ongoing remediation costs.
Key takeaways
Bank of America achieved 16% return on tangible common equity in Q2 2026, six quarters ahead of the end-2027 target.
The bank expects net income to grow $400 million per quarter, driving operating leverage of 200-300 basis points.
Moynihan said the bank is spending $1-3 to remediate issues created by AI model releases, with 3,000 people working on it.
He stated the bank made $5 billion trading in Q3 2026, but fixed income mix hurt performance as clients froze during rate increases.
Moynihan confirmed $200 million incremental expenses in the current quarter for AML and AI remediation, with costs expected to be removed later.
Numbers and commitments
Figure
What it refers to
Type
At
$200 million
Incremental expenses in current quarter for AML and AI remediation
David, thank you. And Brian, thank you for taking the time. There's a lot to get to this morning. But we'll start on that point that David just laid out. Treasury saying that BFA failed to report more than $5 billion in suspicious transactions. And you signed a consent order in 2024 to fix all of this. And regulators said that the problems continued after that. What do you think broke down and how close is the firm to fixing it?
Well, we put lots of resources against this. Thousands of extra teammates. We've lowered the thresholds of reporting that you can see reflected in some of the technical areas. It took us a while to get eye to eye with the regulators about what exactly they wanted our role to be because we file a lot of SARS. And so, the good news is the penalty went through last quarter. The good news is we've built up the resources and are deep into remediating activities and we'll resolve it, like we've done with many issues in the past in this company. It's one of the things we know what to do. There was a bit of a time where we went back and forth about what the right answer was and that's behind us and we're moving forward.
You've said that the remediation efforts are already baked into your run rate expenses at this point in time, but as part of the consent order, the new one, consultants will be reviewing transactions going back four years to 2022. Can you rule out additional penalties or regulatory actions that could stem from that look back?
The lookbacks that they're talking about are obviously in the provisions, but we've already had to do look back for periods of time and the thresholds. It's a very technical thing, but so we're confident that we've got on the right course to remediate everything and the work's going on. And when I say it's in a run rate on expense, what I mean is in the third quarter and in the fourth quarter expenses are flat and in the current quarter we'll have 200 plus million dollars of incremental expenses going against the resolution. And so as we've saved money in other parts of the company, we deployed it over here. And as we get this ironed out and get through the process, we'll take those expenses back out and put them to other use.
Well, there's two elements. One is we got to do the work and then the regulators look at it. So I don't want to speculate about the precise timeline, but we've been working hard on it for a good period of time and will continue to do so.
Now, broadly speaking, the administration has been easing up on banks across the board. I think a lot of people feel this is a deregulatory environment for the banking system. Yet, the Treasury Secretary personally singled out BFA in yesterday's release with a statement from Secretary Bessant, which is somewhat of a rarity for someone at his level in this type of an announcement. And then this morning, BFA was named as one of nine banks in an OC report that alleged it engaged in debanking activities across political, religious, and social views. Are you concerned with where BOVA stands with the Trump administration right now?
Oh, I'm not concerned. We do a great job for America and I think all of us have a common interest in making America successful. And so if you look at our earnings, what you see in our earnings is great core customer activity. We're the largest small business lender and business banker and these rules on the question of debanking stuff have been out there in the fair access laws and we've been adapting to them. So I'm confident that we'll all get to the right place.
10 more exchanges in this transcript
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Moynihan, B. (2026, October 14). Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan BREAKS SILENCE on $1.2B+ Fine & Stock Drop | CNBC [Interview transcript]. StreetPulse Markets. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/3058780/
MLA
Brian Moynihan. "Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan BREAKS SILENCE on $1.2B+ Fine & Stock Drop | CNBC." StreetPulse Markets, 14 Oct. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/3058780/.
BibTeX
@misc{moynihan2026_3058780,
author = {Brian Moynihan},
title = {Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan BREAKS SILENCE on $1.2B+ Fine \& Stock Drop | CNBC},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, StreetPulse Markets. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2026},
month = {oct},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/3058780/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
