There’s a scene near the end of every heist movie where the crew finally cracks the vault and it’s empty. Somebody already got there first, or the money was never really in there to begin with. Four months into medical marijuana’s move to Schedule III, that’s starting to feel like the right metaphor for cannabis banking — not because nobody’s trying to open the vault, but because it turns out rescheduling didn’t come with a combination.
We’ve been here before. Back in April, in “Will the Marijuana Industry’s Access to Banking and Capital Markets Expand with Rescheduling?,” we said the answer was “a qualified yes, with enough asterisks to fill a Phish setlist.” We still think that’s correct, and boy is this taking some time without a whole lot of forward momentum… yet.
What Actually Happened
Here’s a quick recap, because the headlines and the fine print have diverged pretty sharply. On April 22–23, 2026, then-Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche signed a DOJ/DEA order moving FDA-approved cannabis products and state-licensed medical marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III of the Controlled Substances Act. Adult-use cannabis stayed as Schedule I, pending a broader DEA administrative hearing that ran June 29 through July 15, with a final determination from the administrative law judge still pending as of this writing. The announcement was a real and meaningful shift, perhaps most immediately for Section 280E tax relief and for market-structure milestones like Nasdaq’s new listing pathway for compliant medical operators.
What it did not do, according to just about everyone actually advising banks on this (including us), is fix banking for even now Schedule III medical marijuana operators.
Why the Vault Stayed Shut
The entire architecture of cannabis banking has rested for over a decade on a single 2014 FinCEN memo. That guidance told banks how to file the Suspicious Activity Reports they need to serve cannabis clients without running afoul of the Bank Secrecy Act. That guidance was written for a Schedule I world. As Forbes contributor and bank exec Peter Su put it in a piece last month, rescheduling medical cannabis has paradoxically created significant new uncertainty for the banks already serving the industry, precisely because that decade-old FinCEN framework is now effectively obsolete.
Nobody has replaced it yet. Banks are not going to spend the time and money, much less endure the substantial risk of getting it wrong, until their regulators give them a roadmap for how to do so compliantly. The Congressional Research Service made essentially the same point in its own analysis: Rescheduling by itself doesn’t bring state-legal cannabis businesses into full federal compliance, so it isn’t likely to meaningfully change the risk calculus banks use to decide whether to serve them.
Enter (Again) SAFE Banking?
Which brings us to the other vault key everyone’s been waiting on. As we covered in “The Long and Winding Road: SAFE Banking Returns to Congress (Again),” Sen. Jeff Merkley and Rep. Dave Joyce refiled the SAFE Banking Act in late June — bicameral, bipartisan, and, if the bill’s own history is any indication, entirely capable of sitting in committee for another few years. Rescheduling was never a substitute for that legislation. It reduces the risk profile at the margins; it doesn’t hand anyone a safe harbor.
The Bottom Line
If a client is asking whether rescheduling opened the door to easier banking, the honest answer — as of late summer 2026 — is no; if anything, the transition has added a layer of compliance confusion in the short term. The industry got tax relief and a Nasdaq pathway. It did not get FinCEN’s blessing, and it did not get SAFE Banking. Compliance officers are, by every account we’ve read, doing exactly what compliance officers do best: waiting for someone else to move first.
We’ll keep watching Treasury and the banking regulators. History suggests we may be waiting a while. Thanks for stopping by.
The Vault Is Still Locked: A Banking Update on Cannabis Rescheduling
