- Chief Compliance Officer and VP of Legal Affairs, Arrow Electronics
By 
Aaron Nicodemus2024-10-02T18:22:00
Britain’s first digital bank grew exponentially fast in five years, with 43,000 customers ballooning to more than 3.6 million by 2023. Starling Bank’s financial crime program, however, did not keep pace with its growth, according to the U.K.’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). In 2021, the regulator found serious deficiencies in the bank’s financial crime prevention system and ordered it to stop onboarding high-risk customers until improvements were made.
But Starling failed to comply with that order, opening 54,000 accounts for 49,000 customers at high risk of having financial sanctions from 2021-23. Over the same period, Starling reported multiple breaches of financial sanctions to the relevant authorities.
As a result of repeatedly failing to comply with its 2021 order, the FCA announced Wednesday that it fined Starling 29 million pounds (U.S. $38.5 million). The regulator noted that the investigation into the issues at Starling took 14 months to complete—significantly faster than the agency’s 42-month average the last two years.
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