Metro Bank has been fined by the FCA for deficiencies in its anti-money laundering controls. Credit: J. Lekavicius/Shutterstock.

UK-based retail and commercial bank Metro Bank has been fined £16m ($20.47m) by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) for failings in its anti-money laundering systems and controls.

The regulator alleged that the failings affected more than 60 million transactions worth more than £51bn ($65.2bn).

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Between June 2016 and December 2020, Metro Bank did not have adequate systems in place to monitor these transactions for potential money laundering risks.

An error in the bank’s data input for its automated transaction monitoring system, implemented in June 2016, led to missed scrutiny of transactions on the same day an account was opened.

This issue also affected monitoring of subsequent activity until the account record was updated.

Concerns were raised by junior staff regarding unmonitored transaction data in 2017 and 2018, but these warnings did not lead to the identification and resolution of the issue.

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It was not until July 2019 that a fix was implemented, and even then, Metro Bank lacked a consistent mechanism to ensure all relevant transactions were being monitored until December 2020, over four years after the system’s initial deployment.

Since discovering the issues with its transaction monitoring system in April 2019, Metro Bank has established new processes to address the identified problems.

FCA enforcement and market oversight joint executive director Therese Chambers said: “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.”