The Financial Conduct Authority has fined Barclays Bank plc £39,314,700 for failing to properly manage anti-money laundering risks in its corporate banking relationship with Stunt & Co, a company through which £46.8 million connected to a criminal operation passed during a period spanning January 2015 to April 2021. The penalty reflects a 30 per cent settlement discount from the original figure of £56,163,900, which Barclays secured by agreeing to resolve the matter at an early stage of the FCA's enforcement process.
The FCA determined that Barclays breached Principle 2 of its Principles for Businesses, which requires firms to conduct their activities with due skill, care, and diligence. Over the six-year period under review, the bank permitted a substantial volume of criminal funds to move through accounts held by Stunt & Co without adequate scrutiny of the client relationship or the underlying transactions, a failure the regulator attributed to fundamental weaknesses in risk assessment and ongoing monitoring.
RISK FAILURES SUSTAINED OVER SIX YEARS
The FCA's findings reveal that Barclays did not properly risk-assess its relationship with Stunt & Co and failed to maintain adequate ongoing monitoring to identify the suspicious nature of funds flowing through the accounts. Effective anti-money laundering controls require banks to maintain a dynamic understanding of client risk profiles and to subject unusual or anomalous transaction patterns to escalation and review. The regulator's determination is that neither condition was consistently satisfied across the duration of the relationship.
The scale of the funds involved — £46.8 million passing through the accounts over six years — and the length of the monitoring failure amplified the severity of the breach in the FCA's assessment. Financial crime controls that are inadequate over a sustained period present systemic risk, both to the integrity of the financial system and to the institution itself, as the reputational, legal, and financial consequences of such failures ultimately fall on the bank.
Barclays Bank plc has co-operated with the FCA throughout the investigation, a factor that contributed to the settlement discount. The bank will be expected to demonstrate to the regulator that it has addressed the root causes of the failures identified in the Stunt & Co case and strengthened its financial crime controls across comparable corporate banking relationships.
CONCURRENT FINE ON BARCLAYS BANK UK ENTITY
On the same date, the FCA issued a separate fine of £3,093,600 to Barclays Bank UK plc, a legally distinct entity within the Barclays group that operates as the domestic retail and business banking arm. That action concerned failures in account opening controls for client money accounts, with the FCA identifying weak onboarding and know-your-customer processes as the root cause. The two enforcement actions are independent of one another, involving different legal entities and different categories of control failure.
The publication of both fines on 14 July 2025 brings the total regulatory penalty imposed on Barclays group entities by the FCA on a single day to approximately £42.4 million. Taken together, the two actions underscore the breadth of the compliance challenges the regulator has identified within the group and reinforce the FCA's expectation that major banks must maintain rigorous financial crime and client onboarding controls across all business lines and legal entities.