Metro Bank has been fined £16.7m by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) for failings around financial crime.

Between June 2016 and December 2020, the regulator found that Metro Bank failed to have the systems and controls to adequately monitor over 60 million transactions, with a value of over £51bn, for money laundering risks.

Metro Bank automated the monitoring of customer transactions for potential financial crime in June 2016. However, its system did not work as intended. An error in how data was fed into the system meant that transactions taking place on the same day an account was opened, and any further transactions until the account record was updated, were not being monitored.

An FCA investigation found that junior staff did raise concerns about some transaction data not being monitored in 2017 and 2018, although these did not result in the issue being fixed.

On one occasion when a fix had been put in place in July 2019, Metro Bank did not have a mechanism to consistently check that all relevant transactions were being fed into the monitoring system until December 2020 – more than four and a half years after the system was implemented.

Joint executive director of enforcement and market oversight, Therese Chambers, said:
“Metro Bank’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.”

Since the firm’s identification of the issues with its transaction monitoring system in April 2019, Metro Bank has put in place processes to remediate the issues identified.

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