Bank of America’s Moynihan downplays Trump’s Davos jab

Bank of America Chairman and CEO Brian Moynihan on Tuesday downplayed the criticism he received from President Donald Trump at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last month.

During an event at the Economic Club of Washington, D.C., Moynihan argued that the president’s allegations of politically motivated debanking stem from the problem of overregulation.

“Bank of America has 70 million consumer customers, and millions of small businesses all over the country, all over the world, and so we bank everybody,” Moynihan said. “The real question was about overregulation, frankly.”

Moynihan’s comments came in response to a question from moderator David Rubenstein, chairman of the Economic Club of Washington, D.C. and co-founder and co-chairman of the Carlyle Group, about Trump’s allegation that Bank of America and others have refused “conservative business.” Politicians on both sides of the aisle have claimed accounts are being closed — and customers are being “debanked” — due to account holders’ personal beliefs.

“I hope you start opening your bank to conservatives because many conservatives complain that the banks are not allowing them to do business within the bank, and that included a place called Bank of America. They don’t take conservative business,” Trump said at the conference in January, speaking directly to Moynihan on stage. “You, and Jamie [Dimon], and everybody, I hope you’re going to open your banks to conservatives because what you’re doing is wrong.”

On Tuesday, Moynihan pointed to regulators’ interpretations of the Bank Secrecy Act and know-your-customer requirements as the culprit.

“If you look at what’s happened because of interpretations of the AML — anti-money laundering, BSA — Bank Secrecy Act, KYC — know your customer, know your customer’s customer — there’s a lot of burden on the banking system to both report suspicious activity reports and do a lot of analysis,” Moynihan said. “If we have to close accounts, we can tell people why. Often we’re told by authorities to close accounts. That creates confusion.”

“This idea that the regulators are sort of imposing new rules and regulations that the Congress did not intend actually, is kind of an interesting question,” he added.

Moynihan also spoke about one particular industry that frequently complains it’s been the target of debanking: cryptocurrency.

Acting Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Chair Travis Hill earlier this month released a trove of letters sent from the agency, which he said illustrated a pattern of blocking or delaying decisions on cryptocurrency-related activities under the Biden administration.

In a statement released alongside the documents, Hill said the agency’s approach “has contributed to a general perception that the agency was closed for business if institutions are interested in anything related to blockchain or distributed ledger technology.”

Moynihan seemed to allude to the release of the FDIC letters in his remarks Tuesday.

“Regulators said: ‘You can’t bank crypto-operating companies, employees, crypto companies, et cetera,'” Moynihan said.

He emphasized that Bank of America “bank[s] everybody” but said regulators denoted crypto-operating companies as “high risk” and said the bank would need to ask for authorization before banking them.

“And guess what? We’ve never gotten the authority,” Moynihan said. “At the end of the day, it’s about getting these regulations right. I think it opens a dialogue on how to get these regulations correct. … We’re open for everybody. We serve millions and millions of Americans creating transactions every year, and we’ll continue to do so.”

Moynihan said proper regulation is essential to a sound financial system. He noted that the charter for the original institution that became Bank of America was from 1784.

“We’ve been regulated from that day forward,” Moynihan said.

“People always ask me, ‘Do you have different approaches for different administrations?’ And we say, ‘Well, long term, we’ve been around since Washington was president, so if we geared ourselves up for this president, and then that president, we’d have had to change 45 times whatever it is,'” Moynihan said. “What we’re trying to say is, give us a rational regulatory structure and have it stick to the ribs.”