The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has fined Metro Bank £16 million for financial crime failings.

The fine was given to the bank after it failed to have the right systems and controls to monitor more than 60 million transactions with a value of over £51bn, for money laundering risks.

While Metro automated the monitoring of customer transactions for potential financial crime in June 2016, the system did not work as intended.

An error in how data was fed into the system meant transactions taking place on the same day an account was opened, and any further transactions until the account record was updated, were not monitored.

The FCA says that junior staff did not raise concerns about some transaction data not being monitored in 2017 and 2018, but these did not result in the issue being identified and fixed.

Once a fix had been put in place in July 2019, Metro did not have a mechanism to consistently check that all relevant transactions were being fed into the monitoring system until December 2020.

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