Starling Bank fined $38.5M for repeatedly onboarding high-risk customers

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.