Laura WilesThe FCA has fined Metro Bank PLC £16,675,200 for failures relating to the systems and controls it had in place to monitor transactions for money laundering risks.
The period concerned spanned from June 2016 to December 2020, and there were over 60m transactions with a value of over £51bn. Metro had automated its customer transactions monitoring in June 2016, but the systems did not work as intended due to an error in how data was fed into the system which 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 monitored.
After identifying issues with the transaction monitoring system in April 2019, Metro put in place processes to remediate the issues identified.