LONDON (Reuters) -Britain’s financial regulator has fined digital bank Monzo 21 million pounds ($28.57 million) for failings in its anti-financial crime systems, which included onboarding customers who had listed London landmarks as their address.
As Monzo grew rapidly, it failed to maintain good enough controls to prevent the risk of financial crime, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) said in a statement on Tuesday. The regulator issued a fine of 21.1 million pounds for “inadequate anti-financial crime systems and controls” between October 2018 and August 2020.
Monzo said the problems “have been resolved and are firmly in the past” and that it acted quickly to implement a programme to address financial crime issues in February 2021.
Launched in 2015, Monzo is one of a handful of financial services apps, or “fintechs”, to have emerged in Britain in the last decade, offering financial services via an app.
After a 2020 review, the FCA imposed a requirement on Monzo to prevent it from opening new accounts for high-risk customers. But “between August 2020 and June 2022, it repeatedly failed to comply with the terms of the requirement, including signing up over 34,000 high-risk customers,” the FCA said.
“Monzo onboarded customers on the basis of limited, and in some cases, obviously implausible information – such as customers using well known London landmarks as an address,” Therese Chambers, FCA joint executive director of enforcement and market oversight, said.
($1 = 0.7349 pounds)
(Reporting by Tommy Reggiori Wilkes and Elizabeth Howcroft; Editing by Amanda Cooper)
