Cannabis News of Note:
Bloomberg: The Legal Weed Business Is Booming. Bank Access Isn’t (paywalled article, full text below)
CRB Monitor News: Straw-Owner, Diversion Enterprise Shut Down in OK
WWLP Boston: Massachusetts marijuana dispensary used to launder $450K in fentanyl cash
Mass Live: Who is behind the $1.5 million spent to abolish legal weed sales in Massachusetts?
Cannabis Reports of Note:
CRB Monitor News: 2025 Cannabis Legislative Roundup
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Bloomberg: The Legal Weed Business Is Booming. Bank Access Isn’t
Feb 12, 2026, 5:00 AM EST
Charles Gorrivan & Hannah Levitt
The rotunda of the historic Greenpoint Savings Bank building in Brooklyn, New York, is filled with cannabis flower, vapes and gummies, a sunburst-shaped glass oculus overhead. Shoppers can wander into century-old bank vaults, where ads for the “best preroll in the world” cling to safe-deposit boxes. A multiton Diebold door that once guarded money and valuables is now adorned with a glowing marijuana-leaf emblem.
But the dispensary inside the old bank, currently known as FlynnStoned Greenpoint, still struggles to access basic banking services itself. “We’re legal drug dealers that are treated as if we’re illegal drug dealers,” says Joshua Wilson, who works with JTRE Holdings, the real estate company that owns the weed store. “It really feels like we’re the redheaded stepchild.”
The cannabis industry has swelled in the past decade as more and more states have legalized marijuana. Sales across the US reached about $31 billion in 2025, according to cannabis market tracker BDSA, eclipsing the markets for tamer indulgences such as chocolate candy and ice cream. BDSA predicts combined recreational and medical cannabis sales will grow by a third before the end of the decade.
Despite those billions of dollars in annual sales, the thousands of operators in the 40 states where weed is legal in some form are stuck in a financial predicament: Marijuana remains illegal on the federal level. Banks that answer to regulators in Washington—rather than state authorities—have to play by federal rules, which prohibit them from handling money made from illegal substances or lending to the companies associated with them. Working with a dispensary, weed brand or cannabis grower could expose banks to money laundering charges or, in the worst case, jeopardize their federal banking charter.
“No banker has been arrested to our knowledge for taking cannabis deposits, but they don’t want to deal with the compliance issues,” says Michael Beird, vice president at the New Mexico-regulated Southwest Capital Bank and a partner at the Association for Cannabis Banking. “There’s still a stigma associated with it in our country.”
So operators have patched together a system of credit unions and smaller state and regional banks to help handle their deposits. At the end of 2024, 816 financial institutions were serving the cannabis industry, according to data from the US Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN, which tracks how many firms file the mandatory paperwork to work with risky businesses. While that number amounts to less than 10% of the total number of banks and credit unions nationwide, it’s up about 15-fold from early 2014, when the Treasury first issued guidance to help banks work with the sector.
Cannabis sellers often deal with piles of cash. Managers of the Greenpoint dispensary say more than half of its customers pay in hard currency, which a security team transfers each week via armored car to Dime Community Bank, a New York-chartered lender willing to take the deposits. The rest pay with debit cards, which the dispensary runs as ATM-style withdrawals rounded to the nearest $5 or $10; customers get the difference back in singles and coins. This is standard practice in the industry, an effort to avoid scrutiny from big banks.
Credit cards aren’t allowed at all; payment processors such as Visa Inc. and Mastercard Inc. have eschewed the industry to avoid compliance risk. Wilson estimates that the $63 the average customer spends per visit could easily be 15% to 20% higher if the Greenpoint dispensary were allowed to accept credit cards. In his roughly 15 years in the business, he’s tried plenty of fintech startups promising workarounds for the credit card problem. But none of the companies lasted—these third-party providers tend to reappear under new names just as quickly as regulators shut them down.
An even bigger problem for the industry at large is access to credit. Loans to help cannabis growers and sellers expand their businesses are hard to come by. For one, banks are unlikely to accept pot as collateral. Lenders instead ask operators to pledge their equipment and real estate, and occasionally even their homes, says Beird of Southwest Capital Bank. “That’s pretty onerous for a startup,” he says. “A bank’s not going to say, ‘Oh, you’re defaulting on your loan. Would you bring all your weed in so I can sell it on the secondary market? ’”
When lenders do offer loans, interest rates can run as high as 3% a month, or about 36% annually, says Dotan Melch, chief executive officer of cannabis credit firm CTrust. By comparison, median annual interest rates for new small-business term loans were less than 8% in the second quarter, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. “It’s not that you cannot find loans,” Melch says, “but the cost may be prohibitive.”
Change doesn’t seem to be coming anytime soon, though the industry won its first major federal policy victory in December after President Donald Trump directed his administration to reclassify cannabis as a less dangerous drug. While rule changes will ease taxes and potentially attract new lending partners, cannabis will remain federally illegal. Most banks are likely to keep the doors to their capital shut.
Both the marijuana and banking industries have pushed for legislation that would offer a surer fix. The Secure and Fair Enforcement Regulation Banking Act—which would protect banks and credit unions hoping to work with cannabis businesses—has passed through the House of Representatives in various forms, only to stall each time in the Senate.
Part of the frustrating snag comes from lawmakers trying to tack on perks for other groups, including firearms sellers, that complain of lenders “debanking” them for reputational reasons. Those add-ons have complicated the politics, and the cannabis industry is waiting for a bill that can actually cross the finish line.
It’s early days yet for an industry built on a product people are still jailed for supplying. After years of dodging trouble for dealing marijuana before it was legal, Wilson is now selling it openly in the financial capital of America. It’s actually the second time he’s found himself working with a dispensary that operates out of an old bank building, after a stint at one in Hayward, California.
“Just to be able to work inside an old bank, and then not being able to have proper banking access, is just hilarious to me,” he says. “So hilarious it hurts.”