The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority fined Monzo Bank Ltd. £21 million ($29 million) over failures tied to the digital lender’s systems for stopping financial crime.
Between 2018 and 2022 — a period during which Monzo’s customer base soared roughly tenfold to 5.8 million users — the watchdog found that Monzo did not obtain sufficient information about customers during the onboarding process, the FCA said in a statement.
For instance, the company ultimately found cases where customers used foreign addresses with UK postcodes or “obviously implausible” addresses like those of famous British landmarks, the agency said.
“This illustrates how lacking Monzo’s financial crime controls were,” Therese Chambers, the FCA’s joint executive director of enforcement and market oversight, said in the statement. “This was compounded by its inability to properly comply with the requirement not to onboard high-risk customers.”
Monzo, which now has 13 million customers, said it began working in 2021 to address the issues and has made a “significant investment” in recruiting financial crime experts to help it improve its processes.
“The FCA’s findings relate to a historical period that ended three years ago and draw a line under issues that have been resolved and are firmly in the past – with our learnings at the time leading to substantial improvements in our controls,” Chief Executive Officer TS Anil said in a separate statement.
This is the 10th fine the FCA has imposed on a bank for similar failings with financial crimes in the last four years. In October, the regulator announced it had fined Starling Bank £29 million for what it described as “shockingly lax” controls around risky customers.
