The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has fined Metro Bank PLC (Metro) £16,675,200 for failing to have the right anti-financial crime measures in place.
According to the regulator, between June 2016 and December 2020, Metro failed to have the right AML systems and controls for over 60 million transactions made via the bank, with a value of over £51bn.
Metro 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 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 FCA says junior staff did 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. Even once a fix had been put in place in July 2019, Metro did not have a mechanism to consistently check that all relevant transactions were being fed into the monitoring system until December 2020, over four-and-a-half years after the system was implemented.
“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, the FCA’s joint executive director of enforcement and market oversight.
Since the firm’s identification of the issues with its transaction monitoring system in April 2019, Metro has put in place processes to remediate the issues identified.
Metro has accepted the regulator’s findings and has resolved the issues raised. The fine was reduced from £23.8m to £16.7m after Metro agreed to take remedial action.
