Metro Bank fined over money laundering risks

The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has fined Metro Bank £16.7 million for failures in its anti-money laundering systems.

Between June 2016 and December 2020, Metro Bank failed to have adequate monitoring systems in place for over 60m transactions, with a value of over £51bn.

Metro Bank could have faced a far larger fine of £23.8 million but qualified for a 30% discount because it agreed to resolve the matter.

Therese Chambers, joint executive director of enforcement and market oversight at the FCA said the Bank’s actions had increased the risk of financial crime going undetected. “Metro's failings risked a gap being left in our defense against the criminal misuse of our financial system. Those failings went on for too long,” said Chambers.

Metro automated the monitoring of customer transactions for potential financial crime in June 2016, however, the system did not operate as expected.

Due to an error with the data being fed into the system, transactions occurring on the same day an account was opened, and any further transactions until the account record was updated, were not monitored.

In both 2017 and 2018, junior staff raised concerns about the monitoring failure, but these concerns were not identified nor fixed.

In July of 2019, a fix had been put in place, but even then, the bank did not have the correct mechanism to check that all relevant transactions were being fed into the monitoring system. The failures were only finally corrected in December 2020 — over four years after the system was first put in place.