Amid allegations of inadequate anti-money laundering and financial crime controls, the U.K.’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has fined Metro Bank plc £16.7 million.
In a release Monday, the FCA said it sanctioned the bank for allegedly breaching the regulator’s principles by implementing a flawed system that was supposed to automatically monitor transactions for potential illegal activity.
“An error in how data was fed into the system meant transactions taking place on the same day an account was opened, and any further transactions until the account record was updated, were not monitored,” the regulator said.
As a result, between June 2016 and December 2020, the bank didn’t have the proper systems and controls in place to adequately monitor more than 60 million transactions for money laundering risks, the FCA alleged.
The regulator noted that junior staff at the bank tried to sound the alarm about some transaction data not being monitored as early as 2017, but these warnings didn’t result in the issue being fixed. And, even after the issue was eventually fixed in mid-2019, “Metro did not have a mechanism to consistently check that all relevant transactions were being fed into the monitoring system until December 2020,” the FCA said.
The bank agreed to settle the FCA’s charges, qualifying for a 30% discount on its financial sanctions, which otherwise would have been £23.8 million. The regulator also noted that the bank has since fixed its controls.
“Metro’s failings risked a gap being left in our defence against the criminal misuse of our financial system. Those failings went on for too long,” said Therese Chambers, joint executive director of enforcement and market oversight at the FCA, in the release.