Amex Fined $350 Million Over Anti-Money-Laundering Failures

American Express has been fined $350 million and placed under two separate regulatory orders after US banking supervisors found serious gaps in its anti-money-laundering controls. The action covers roughly $13 billion in suspected trade-based money laundering that the regulators say went unflagged.

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) imposed the penalty on American Express National Bank on Thursday, 8 October 2026, alongside a cease-and-desist order. The Federal Reserve issued its own cease-and-desist order the same day against the parent, American Express Co., and American Express Travel Related Services. The Fed did not levy a fine.

What the regulators found

The OCC set out three broad failures, according to reports in American Banker, Banking Dive and Reuters. First, the bank had not devoted enough resources to its anti-money-laundering programme. Second, its risk assessment was not tailored to how the business actually operates. The regulator said it concentrated on the “relatively narrow” deposit products rather than the “more dominant” card business. Third, there were “systemic breakdowns” in spotting and reporting suspicious activity, leading to suspicious activity reports (SARs) that were late, missed or incomplete.

American Banker reported that the suspected laundering ran from about June 2014 to May 2025 and included accounts linked to bank insiders. Other outlets described the period more loosely as the past decade.

The Federal Reserve’s order cited “significant deficiencies” in the company’s enterprise-wide financial crimes risk management.

Comptroller of the Currency Jonathan Gould said the OCC expects banks of Amex’s size and complexity to commit sufficient resources to compliance.

What Amex must now do

The orders require a board-level compliance committee, a comprehensive remediation plan and an independent look-back review to establish whether additional SARs should have been filed. Under the Fed’s order, the company must also cooperate with any investigations of employees and other parties involved.

Chairman and chief executive Stephen J. Squeri acknowledged the task ahead. “While we have made meaningful progress, we know there is more work to do,” he said.

The company said part of the penalty had already been provided for in earlier periods. Amex kept its full-year 2026 guidance unchanged and said the orders are not expected to affect its 2027 outlook. Importantly for investors, the action does not include an asset cap, the restriction that limited Wells Fargo’s balance-sheet growth for years after its sales-practices scandal.

Amex shares fell almost 2% in after-hours trading following the announcement, Yahoo Finance reported.

Context: a second regulatory knock in weeks

The enforcement action is not a complete surprise. Amex had previously disclosed that regulators were reviewing its compliance programme. But it comes shortly after another rebuke. Last month, the Federal Reserve and the FDIC raised questions about whether Amex’s resolution plan, the blueprint for an orderly wind-down if the firm failed, was workable. That plan assumed a single sale of the bank, the operating company and parent-company assets.

The size of the penalty puts it among the larger anti-money-laundering fines imposed on a US card issuer. It also complicates a widely held view on Wall Street that bank supervision has been softening under the current administration. Regulators have shown they will still act hard on financial-crimes controls, even as they ease other rules.

Why it matters for banks and investors

The timing is notable. Large US banks begin reporting third-quarter results next week, and the Amex orders will likely bring compliance spending and regulatory risk into sharper focus on earnings calls. Investors will want to know whether peers face similar scrutiny of how their risk assessments match their actual product mix.

The central criticism carries a broader lesson. Amex is primarily a card company with a growing deposit franchise. The OCC’s complaint, in effect, was that the bank calibrated its monitoring around the smaller deposit business rather than the card network where most of the money moves. Trade-based laundering, in which illicit funds are disguised through invoices and payments for goods, can be hard to detect inside large volumes of legitimate commercial card spending. For any lender whose business has shifted faster than its controls, that is a warning.

For Amex shareholders, the financial hit looks manageable. The fine is partly reserved, guidance stands and there is no cap on growth. The larger cost may come over time: building out compliance staff and technology, paying for an independent look-back, and absorbing the management attention that remediation demands. Regulators usually lift such orders only after sustained evidence of improvement, which can take years.

The India connection

American Express runs a substantial operations and technology presence in India. In May 2024 it opened its largest global campus, spanning more than one million square feet, in Gurugram’s Sector 74A. The company has not said where the remediation work will be done. Global banks, though, have often leaned on their Indian capability centres for large compliance and technology build-outs. Indian IT and analytics firms that work on financial-crimes software and transaction monitoring could also see demand as US lenders tighten controls after high-profile penalties.

What happens next

Amex must now submit its remediation plans to the OCC and the Fed and commission the independent SAR look-back. Its third-quarter earnings call will be the first chance for analysts to question management on the expected cost and timeline of the clean-up, and on whether the look-back could surface further issues.

Beyond Amex, the episode will be watched closely by compliance teams across US banking. With large lenders about to report results, the message from Washington is that resources for anti-money-laundering work need to match the size and shape of the business.