The CFO of Fintech Company Revolut has been forced to resign as the company is increasingly engulfed in a serious money laundering and criminal practices scandal.

Their Chief Financial Officer Peter O’Higgins, who had been at the helm since 2016 has resigned with immediate effect this week.

The Telegraph initially reported that documents passed to them by a whistleblower show that for the previous three months Revolut has de-activated an automated system in place to prohibit potential shady money transfers.

The automated system had incorrectly been blocking various legitimate transactions that were being classified as ‘false positives.’ This led to the bank to disable its blocking system and switch to a screening process that resulted in suspicious transactions to be completed.

In a letter to the FCA in September 2018, Revolut’s head of legal Tom Hambrett wrote:

“The investigation concluded that the original decision to turn off the transaction-halting mechanism was erroneous and implied remediable systems and controls are failing,” he further added that the digital bank has since introduced a new system following the incident.

However, interestingly a Revolut spokesperson revealed that the letter while drafted was never in fact sent.

Nik Storonsky who is the founder and CEO of Revolut says that the monitoring system was a ‘systems enhancing project’ and he further stated:

“Like any technology company, we always seek to improve our systems. The new systems were not calibrated to a standard that we would expect, so we reverted to our existing process until calibration was complete.

At no point during this time do we believe that we failed to meet our legal or regulatory sanctions requirements. A thorough review has been undertaken of the transactions that were processed, which has confirmed that there were no sanctioned transactions.”

Marketed as a fintech-friendly superior alternative to established mainstream banks, Revolut has witness a meteoric rise over the past four years since an initial $2 billion funding. The company has opened between 8,000 and 10,000 current accounts and handles transactions valuing over $4 billion monthly for its four million customers across Europe.

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