The Financial Conduct Authority fined Monzo Bank Limited £21,091,300 on 8 July 2025 for serious failings in its financial crime controls during a period of rapid customer growth. The regulator found that as Monzo's customer base expanded from approximately 600,000 in 2018 to more than 5.8 million by 2022, the bank's frameworks for customer due diligence and transaction monitoring failed to keep pace, creating material gaps in its ability to detect and prevent financial crime.
Therese Chambers, the FCA's joint executive director of enforcement and market oversight, said Monzo "fell far short of what we, and society, expect".
FINDINGS
Deficiencies were identified in customer onboarding, customer risk assessment and transaction monitoring, and Monzo also repeatedly breached a requirement imposed in August 2020 not to open accounts for high-risk customers, signing up more than 34,000 such customers between August 2020 and June 2022.
PRIOR FCA ACTIONS AND REMEDIATION
The FCA said this was the 10th fine it had imposed on a bank for financial crime control failings in the last four years.
According to the FCA, Monzo has established and completed a financial crime change programme to remediate the identified failings.
Bank news that matters, every weekday.
Follow The Global Banker on LinkedIn