I’ll be honest I stopped at the headline , which weirdly gives a totally different time period to the article. I still stand by some of my point though.
It’s not realistic to think a new CEO could just magically fix things overnight so I’d give them at least a year to start to solve it. I think if we found that after three years things hadn’t fundamentally improved then yes additional criticism would be warranted.
This isn’t a TS fanboy moment by the way, the fact this was happening under anyone’s watch is frankly ridiculous and shows what happens when you focus on new shiny things over core banking principles.
I agree with you to an extent, but the FCA ordered an independent review in August 2020, just after TS Anil had taken over. Also:
“Alongside the independent review, the FCA imposed a requirement preventing Monzo from opening new accounts for high-risk customers. However, between August 2020 and June 2022, it repeatedly failed to comply with the terms of the requirement, including signing up over 34,000 high-risk customers.”
You would have thought that a new CEO would have made complying with an order from the FCA one of his top priorities. Instead, he ignored it, or at least he didn’t take enough steps to enforce it, and that doesn’t look good.
The FCA decision letter gives more detail and seems quite damning - mentioning weaknesses, insufficient controls over several years and not acting on internal warnings.
I would suggest that the problems would have been much more culturally deep rooted than just the CEO.
It’s interesting how this compares to Monzo’s previous claims of having lower fraud rates due to its technology being able to better detect it.
Joining an already crowded market with tons of cheap, competitive offerings already out there is going to be interesting to watch. Not sure how they hope to differentiate themselves….
