SEATTLE, WA - MARCH 14: As employees advise clients on the more than twenty strands available at A Greener Today, a popular cannabis store in Seattle, one client uses the in-store ATM to retreive cash, on March 14, 2014 in Seattle, Washington. Because federal laws still prohibit the sale of legal cannabis, stores don't have access to the banking system and have to conduct all business in cash, which creates security issues. With legal medical cannabis allowed in over 20 states, and recreational use allowed in two (Colorado and Washington), the legal cannabis market is primed to expand dramatically. Privateer Holdings, a private equity firm that invests only in legal medical and recreational cannabis markets, has already raised over 50 millions dollars from investors, effectively bringing cannabis to Wall Street (Photo by Gilles Mingasson/Getty Images).
Getty Images
When Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche signed the order on April 22, 2026 moving FDA-approved and state-licensed medical cannabis from Schedule I to Schedule III of the Controlled Substances Act, the headlines were triumphant. After decades of advocacy, federal drug policy had finally acknowledged what millions of Americans already knew: cannabis has legitimate medical value. For the cannabis industry, long burdened by punishing tax treatment under IRC Section 280E and starved of mainstream capital, the relief was palpable.
But in the offices of compliance officers at the banks that quietly — and painstakingly — built programs to serve the cannabis industry, the mood was considerably more complicated. Because what the April 22nd order did not do, perhaps as consequentially as what it did, was tell banks what to do next.
To understand the bind banks now find themselves in, you have to go back to February 14, 2014. That's when the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) issued guidance — formally known as FIN-2014-G001 — that gave banks a narrow but functional pathway to serve cannabis-related businesses without running afoul of the Bank Secrecy Act. The guidance required banks to file cannabis-specific Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs), conduct heightened due diligence, and treat cannabis proceeds as presumptively suspicious — all because cannabis was a Schedule I substance, defined under federal law as having no accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse.
The FinCEN guidance was never a statute, a regulation, or a notice-and-comment rule. It was guidance — a Treasury Department guidance premised entirely on Schedule I classification. And for more than a decade, it remained in place, surviving the rescission of the Cole Memorandum in 2018, the expansion of state-legal markets to 40 states for medical use and 24 states for adult use, and multiple failed congressional attempts to pass the SAFE/SAFER Banking Act. The guidance became, by default, the entire legal architecture of cannabis banking.
Now cannabis — or at least a portion of it — is no longer Schedule I. And the guidance has not been updated.
This is the crux of the problem. Banks that have operated cannabis banking programs under FinCEN 2014 now face a structural mismatch: the regulatory framework they rely on was built around a legal premise that no longer fully applies.
Justin Fischer, CEO of RiskScout, a compliance and fraud prevention technology platform that has helped grow and manage some of the largest cannabis banking programs in the US, frames the dilemma plainly via email "Rescheduling is a positive signal, but it creates a real compliance paradox for financial institutions. The FinCEN 2014 guidance was built for a Schedule I substance, so it doesn't map cleanly onto a Schedule III product. Banks are going to need updated regulatory guidance that reflects the reality of what rescheduling actually means, not just the optics of it."
The paradox runs in both directions. If banks continue applying the 2014 FinCEN framework as written — treating cannabis deposits as presumptively suspicious, filing cannabis-specific SARs, maintaining the elevated due diligence posture designed for a Schedule I controlled substance — they are operating a compliance regime that was explicitly designed around a classification that has now changed, at least for qualifying medical operators. That is not a defensible long-term posture.
But the alternative is no cleaner. Schedule III substances fall squarely within the FDA’s pharmaceutical regulatory framework: manufacturing must occur at DEA-registered facilities complying with current Good Manufacturing Practices; distribution must flow through authorized wholesalers, pharmacies, and registered handlers; and sales to consumers must proceed through valid prescriptions. State-licensed cannabis businesses — the businesses banks are actually serving — do not fit within that structure. They are not FDA-approved pharmacies. Their products are not federally prescribable drugs. The state-legal cannabis retail model has no clear analogue under federal Schedule III law.
So, if banks pivot away from the 2014 FinCEN framework and instead attempt to apply Schedule III pharmaceutical compliance standards to their cannabis clients, those clients almost certainly cannot meet them. The industry would not just face compliance friction — it would face structural ineligibility.
Fischer captures this dimension, "the challenge with rescheduling isn't the change itself, it's the gap between when policy shifts and when regulators give banks clear guidance on what to do next. We've seen this before. Banks that have built disciplined, well-documented cannabis programs will be best positioned to adapt. Those that have been waiting on the sidelines will have even less clarity than they do today."
The April 22nd order makes matters more complicated still by creating a two-tiered system. The Blanche order immediately rescheduled FDA-approved cannabis products and state-licensed medical cannabis to Schedule III. Adult-use, or recreational cannabis, remains on Schedule I pending the outcome of an expedited administrative hearing set to begin June 29, 2026.
This bifurcation creates a new set of problems for financial institutions. A bank with cannabis clients operating in both medical and adult-use markets — or in states where the same license covers both — must now determine whether a different compliance framework applies to different revenue streams generated by the same business. The operational complexity of that exercise, in the absence of updated federal guidance, is considerable.
Sahar Ayinehsazian, a partner and member of the cannabis & corporate practice at A.Y. Strauss, anticipates this dynamic, "I agree that rescheduling is not a fix-all for cannabis banking — at best, medical operators will likely face even more stringent due diligence disclosure requirements, with not too much difference in adult-use banking. It is highly possible we may see a disruption or pause in adult-use banking, as financial institutions and their regulators navigate the ripple effects of the April 22nd order." says Sahar via email.
In her firm's white paper on the subject, Ayinehsazian notes that "medical cannabis operators will arguably continue to face more disclosure requirements from their banks than less heavily regulated businesses, with potentially higher costs. Until such time as cannabis is more broadly rescheduled, adult-use operators may not see many, if any, changes to their banking opportunities."
The practical implication: banks that currently serve adult-use operators may face a period of genuine uncertainty — not because the law has clearly changed against them, but because no one has yet told them how the changed law applies.
Given this uncertainty, what will banks actually do? The available evidence suggests: not much, at least in the short term.
FinCEN’s own data through 2025 suggested around 800 financial institutions reporting cannabis-related accounts — though many industry insiders believe the true number of institutions actively underwriting plant-touching operators is far smaller, perhaps closer to 100. The institutions that have built real cannabis banking programs have done so by constructing compliance architectures that are expensive to build and expensive to abandon. They are not likely to dismantle those programs because of ambiguity. But they are also unlikely to dramatically expand their cannabis portfolios until there is clarity on what the new framework actually requires.
Joseph Silvia, a former Federal Reserve lawyer who represents banks, fintechs, and other clients on M&A, payments, cannabis banking, and other regulatory matters at Duane Morris does not expect the rescheduling to move the needle in either direction. "Banks are in a potentially difficult place with the rescheduling, but what I expect is that most will continue running their cannabis banking programs as they have been." says Silvia via email. And on the question of new market entrants, "Banks will not be flooding the market to establish new cannabis banking programs simply because of rescheduling. It really hasn't moved the needle for banks."
This inertia has a certain logic. The fundamental legal risk that has kept major national banks out of cannabis — the absence of a statutory safe harbor protecting institutions from federal penalties for processing cannabis proceeds — has not changed with rescheduling. Cannabis remains federally illegal for adult-use purposes. And even for medical operators now under Schedule III, the mismatch between the state-licensed distribution model and the FDA pharmaceutical framework means that the "clean" compliance path does not yet exist.
The irony is that the fix to the compliance paradox is not necessarily legislative. As one recent analysis noted, the 2014 FinCEN guidance was just a memo — and like the Cole Memorandum before it, it could be revised by Treasury unilaterally. Treasury, in theory, could issue updated guidance tomorrow that replaces the Schedule I-based SAR framework with an ordinary risk-based monitoring approach for qualifying medical cannabis businesses.
Without it, the compliance paradox persists. Banks face a binary choice between a framework built for a classification that has partially changed and a pharmaceutical framework their clients cannot satisfy. Neither option is stable. And in the gap between policy change and regulatory clarity, the industry that was supposed to benefit from rescheduling may find itself, paradoxically, in a more uncertain banking environment than it was in before.
For operators and financial institutions alike, the lesson is a familiar one from a decade of cannabis banking: federal policy announcements are not the same thing as operational clarity. The work of translating one into the other still lies ahead.
此内容由惯性聚合(RSS阅读器)自动聚合整理，仅供阅读参考。 原文来自 — 版权归原作者所有。