FCA fine Metro Bank £16m for transaction monitoring failings

Metro Bank has been fined £16 million by the FCA for financial crime failings, specifically related to inadequate transaction monitoring. The issues involved the failure to properly monitor over 60 million transactions worth more than £51 billion for money laundering risks. Despite implementing an automated system in June 2016, errors in data processing led to significant gaps in monitoring. The FCA highlighted that Metro Bank took too long to identify and rectify these failings, which risked undermining the defence against the criminal misuse of the financial system.

The key themes from the FCA's final notice include weak governance and oversight, issues with system calibration, failures within the exceptions process and poor data quality feeding into their transaction monitoring system. These deficiencies highlighted the Bank's inability to adequately manage and oversee critical financial crime controls, resulting in significant gaps and weaknesses in their anti-money laundering defences.

Our gap analysis is linked below for you and your senior management to break down the key issues and challenge yourselves on the adequacy of your controls against the FCA's expectations.

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