The UK financial regulator, the FCA, announced that it has been imposed on imposition is imposed on the imposition of the enforcement of the online bank Monzo Bank Ltd a total of £ 21,091,300, for inadequate anti -financial crime systems and controls between October 2018 and August 20.
Monzo has also repeatedly violated a requirement that prevents it from opening high -risk customers between August 2020 and June 2022.
FCA noted that Monzo would have been fined £ 30,130,475, but agreed to resolve these issues and thus be suitable for a 30% discount according to FCA procedures.
The Monzo customer base increased rapidly, increasing almost ten times from about 600,000 in 2018 to over 5.8 million in 2022.
Specifically, Monzo has failed to design, implement and maintain adequate customer boarding systems, customer risk assessment and trading monitoring systems to mitigate the risk of financial crime. These systematic failures resulted in the FCA required by a comprehensive, independent review of the company’s financial crime in August 2020.
Along with the independent review, the FCA has imposed a requirement that prevents Monzo from opening new accounts for high -risk customers. However, from August 2020 and June 2022, it has repeatedly failed to comply with the terms of the claim, including registration of over 34,000 high -risk customers.
Therese Chambers, the joint executive director of enforcement and supervision on the market, said, said,
“Banks are a vital line of defense in the collective battle against economic crime, they must have systems to prevent the flow of bad profits in the financial system, Monzo has fallen far from what we and society are awaiting.
“Monzo has imposed customers on the basis of limited and in some cases obviously unpredictable information-such as customers using well-known London milestones as a address, this shows how the monzo financial crime controls.
Monzo has created and completed a program of change of financial crime to remedy and enhance the broader financial crime control of the financial crime in accordance with the recommendations made in the independent review.
FCA has said it continues to oversee businesses to improve standards and to ensure that they have the right systems and controls to manage the risk management for financial crime. This is the tenth fine that FCA has imposed on a bank for failure to control financial crime over the past four years.