The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has reportedly fined Metro Bank PLC £16,675,200.
The FCA noted that between the timeframe of June 2016 and December 2020, Metro Bank had allegedly failed to have the “right systems and controls” in order to adequately monitor over 60m transactions, with a value of more than £51 billion, “for money laundering risks.”
According to the update from the FCA, Metro has reportedly automated the monitoring of customer transactions for potential financial crime related issues in June of 2016.
But, the FCA pointed out that its system did “not work as intended.”
According to the FCA’s announcement, 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.”
Junior staff did reportedly raise concerns about some “transaction data not being monitored in 2017 and 2018, but these did not result in the issue being identified and fixed.”
The FCA also mentioned that even once a fix had been put in place in July 2019, Metro reportedly did “not have a mechanism to consistently check that all relevant transactions were being fed into the monitoring system until December 2020, over 4 and a half years after the system was implemented.”
Therese Chambers, the joint executive director of enforcement and market oversight, has commented that Metro’s failings “risked a gap being left in the defense against the criminal misuse of our financial system.”
Chambers has added that those failings “went on for too long.”
Since the firm’s identification of the issues described with its transaction monitoring system in April of 2019, Metro has now reportedly “put in place processes to remediate the issues identified.”
The FCA continues to supervise firms to ensure that they have the right systems and controls “to manage financial crime risks.”
