The Cole Memo is the law of the land when it comes to cannabis banking.
Welcome to the latest episode, this time we’re talking about the Cole memo, cannabis banking and what the options might be.
It’s a common misconception among, well, among nearly everyone really, that banks “can’t” open accounts for cannabis and marijuana companies – we see that repeated all over the place. Bottom line, that’s not quite true.
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We’re going to walk through the Cole Memo in this episode, discuss the history of how we got to where we are now, and in the next episode, we’ll focus on the FinCEN guidelines and what we think they mean for the industry.
This is an ongoing topic for us, and we won’t cover everything in this episode.
There’s a huge misconception in the US about what’s allowed and what is not with banking –
This applies to both deposit and transaction processing, along with loans, and other transactions that involve financial institutions getting involved. This misconception repeats itself day after day, in articles, in the news, it’s really kind of frustrating.
In this episode, we’re going to work our way forward from 2009, which is when Ogden, the first US Attorney to write a memo on cannabis, actually published that first one.
We’ll talk about all three of the Cole memo versions, including the one that had near disastrous consequences for the medical marijuana industry. And we’ll talk about the ways that things have changed, and are continuing to change, in the state legal marijuana industry.
This is a big topic, and it spans more than just the Cole memo.
There are a lot of moving parts here, and we believe – in our non-lawyer, reading in plain English, way of looking at the topic, that there is a ray of hope on the horizon for creating a framework that allows state licensed growers, dispensary owners and others to have traditional bank accounts right now.