CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Bank of America, the Charlotte-based banking giant, said Wednesday that a $1.2 billion regulatory penalty for anti-money-laundering failures cut into third-quarter profit even as core lending income kept growing.
The company reported net income of about $6.93 billion, or 91 cents a share, for the quarter ended Sept. 30. Stripping out the settlement charge, earnings were about $8.1 billion, or $1.08 a share, just under the $1.10 Wall Street had expected. Revenue rose about 3 percent to roughly $30 billion.
Regulators said the fine follows failures to detect and report large volumes of suspicious activity and comes with a consent order that requires outside help to rebuild monitoring. CEO Brian Moynihan told analysts the bank has already spent more than $200 million on remediation this quarter and assigned thousands of employees to the cleanup, with no asset-growth cap attached to the order.
Trading desks also cooled. Fixed-income trading revenue fell about 17 percent from a year earlier, while investment-banking fees dropped about 11 percent. Net interest income, the spread the bank earns on loans versus deposits, climbed about 8 percent to about $16.4 billion on higher balances.
The results land in a city that ranks as the second-largest U.S. banking center after New York, anchored by Bank of America’s global headquarters and Truist’s headquarters, with more than 100,000 financial-services jobs regionwide. The Bank of America Corporate Center tower remains the Uptown landmark for that headquarters campus, so a multibillion-dollar charge and a sliding stock price are watched closely by Charlotte’s finance workforce.
Shares slid several percent on the report, wiping out tens of billions in market value as investors digested both the penalty and the softer capital-markets quarter.
