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The U.K. Financial Conduct Authority disclosed a £21 million penalty Tuesday against Monzo Bank after finding that the digital lender maintained lax anti-money laundering controls and repeatedly breached a previously imposed restriction.

The FCA noted that in 2020, amid rapid growth of Monzo’s customer base, regulators uncovered a string of “systemic” compliance deficiencies and subsequently barred the London-based institution from opening accounts for clients deemed to pose an inherently high risk of financial crime.

But Monzo failed to comply and opened accounts for more than 34,000 high-risk customers between August 2020 and June 2022. The FCA fined Starling Bank, another London-based challenger bank, £29 million over similar violations in October 2024.

“Monzo onboarded customers on the basis of limited, and in some cases, obviously implausible information, such as customers using well-known London landmarks as an address,” Therese Chambers, the FCA’s co-director of enforcement, said iTuesday. “This illustrates how lacking Monzo’s financial crime controls were.”