Starling Bank Limited · £29m fine
27 September 2024 · FRN 730166
The FCA fined Starling Bank £28,959,426 for failings in its financial crime systems and controls between December 2019 and November 2023 — the regulator's first fine against a digital challenger bank. Starling's customer numbers grew from about 43,000 in 2017 to 3.6 million in 2023 but its safeguards did not keep up: in January 2023 it discovered that since 2017 its automated screening had been checking customers against only a fraction of the full financial sanctions list, and it breached a requirement agreed with the FCA in 2021 not to open accounts for high-risk customers by opening over 54,000 accounts for around 49,000 such customers between September 2021 and November 2023. The FCA described the bank's controls as "shockingly lax". Starling agreed to settle and received a 30% discount; the fine would otherwise have been £40,959,426.