Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Lithuanian regulators have hit Revolut with a €3.5mn fine over failings in its money laundering processes, marking the UK fintech’s largest financial penalty.
The Bank of Lithuania — which regulates Revolut’s operations in Europe along with the European Central Bank — on Tuesday said it had fined the fintech after identifying “violations and shortcomings in the monitoring of business relationships and [transactions]”.
These “resulted in the bank not always properly identifying suspicious monetary operations or transactions carried out by customers”, the watchdog said.
Revolut was fined €70,000 by the Bank of Lithuania in 2022 for failing to submit its financial statements on time.
The fast-growing fintech, which was last valued at $45bn, has attracted scrutiny over the robustness of its controls. Revolut secured a full European banking licence from authorities in Lithuania in 2021, allowing it to operate as a bank across the region.
But its application for a banking licence with UK regulators stalled for more than three years after it ran into a series of problems, including auditor BDO warning in 2023 that the design of its IT system meant there was a risk that the bulk of its 2021 revenue had been “materially misstated”.
Revolut said it was committed to the highest standards of regulatory compliance and had co-operated with the Bank of Lithuania in taking immediate action to address the procedural deficiencies.
“We continue to invest to ensure we have best in class controls in the fight against financial crime,” Revolut said.
A person close to Revolut, which is Europe’s most valuable start-up, said the central bank had not identified confirmed instances of money laundering and that its findings had been focused on improvements in its existing controls.
They added that the fine represented less than 0.5 per cent of the company’s revenue in 2023, far below the maximum potential fine of 10 per cent for violations of Lithuanian anti-money laundering laws.
The central bank said Revolut’s European bank had “acknowledged the identified violations and deficiencies, took action on its own initiative to eliminate them [and] prepared and agreed on a plan to eliminate the violations and deficiencies”.
Revolut received a UK banking licence with restrictions in July last year. It is expected to exit a so-called mobilisation stage, allowing it to complete the set-up of its processes before launching as a fully fledged bank in its home market later this year.
Digital banks have attracted scrutiny in recent years as regulators have expressed concerns that their internal controls have not kept up with their fast growth. The UK Financial Conduct Authority warned in 2022 that a surge in reports to the National Crime Agency had raised “concerns about the adequacy of [neobanks’] checks when taking on new customers”.
Starling Bank was fined £29mn by the FCA last year after it accused the challenger bank of “shockingly lax” controls against financial crime.
The UK watchdog is separately conducting a civil probe into money-laundering controls at Revolut rival Monzo Bank, the bank said in its annual report in June last year, having downgraded it from a criminal matter.
Additional reporting by Richard Milne
