Metro Bank fined £16.6m by FCA

The bank automated the monitoring of customer transactions for potential financial crime in June 2016, however the systems 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.

Despite junior staff raising concerns about some transaction data not being monitored in 2017 and 2018, these did not result in the issue being identified and fixed.

A fix was put in place in July 2019, however Metro did not have a mechanism to consistently check that all relevant transactions were being fed into the monitoring system until over four and a half years after system implementation by December 2020.

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.

Therese Chambers, joint executive director of enforcement and market oversight, at the FCA commented: “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.”