Regulatory gap analysis: FCA action against Be Account Ltd highlights systemic AML control weaknesses
At the end of 2025 the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) imposed immediate restrictions on Be Account Ltd, an authorised Electronic Money Institution (EMI), after concluding that the firm had serious and systemic weaknesses in its financial crime controls.
The FCA’s Supervisory Notice identifies widespread failings across the customer lifecycle, including Customer Risk Assessment (CRA), Customer Due Diligence (CDD), Enhanced Due Diligence (EDD), PEP and sanctions screening, transaction monitoring, governance, and suspicious activity reporting. The FCA concluded that these weaknesses meant the firm could not demonstrate it was able to effectively identify, manage, monitor, or report the risk of its business being used to facilitate financial crime.
Key issues included poorly documented and inconsistently applied risk assessments, inadequate understanding of customers’ business models and account purpose, weak source of wealth and source of funds checks, over-reliance on automated screening tools, and transaction monitoring controls that were not sufficiently risk-based or supported by meaningful investigation. The FCA also identified significant governance failures, including a lack of clear senior management oversight and insufficient rationale supporting key onboarding, monitoring, and offboarding decisions.
Why this matters beyond EMIs
Although Be Account is an EMI, the FCA’s findings are not unique to electronic money institutions. The failings identified relate to core financial crime obligations under the Money Laundering Regulations and FCA expectations that apply equally to banks, building societies, payment service providers, investment firms, wealth managers, fintechs, and other regulated entities. The themes highlighted by the FCA—poor risk articulation, weak evidence of challenge, and ineffective monitoring—are common drivers of supervisory intervention across all firm types.
Learn from the FCA’s findings
To help you test your own framework against the FCA’s observations, we have created a Regulatory Gap Analysis Template designed to help you:
Assess the effectiveness of your CDD, CRA, EDD, transaction monitoring, and governance controls
Identify gaps in both design and day-to-day execution
Use open, reflective self-assessment questions to challenge assumptions and risk decisions
Support remediation planning, internal assurance, and regulatory readiness
This approach is intended to help firms move beyond policy-level compliance and demonstrate that financial crime controls operate effectively in practice—something the FCA continues to prioritise across all sectors.
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