The Financial Conduct Authority censured CACEIS UK on 25 June 2026 and secured a 31,714,068 pound voluntary payment for clients of the collapsed wealth manager WealthTek, after the asset servicing bank failed to act on clear signs of financial crime risk. Notably, the FCA imposed no fine, crediting the firm’s co-operation and payment. The penalty would otherwise have been 23,091,000 pounds after a settlement discount.
The failure was inaction on checks it already ran
What sank CACEIS UK was not a missing check. On three separate occasions the bank looked up WealthTek on the Financial Services Register and saw the firm was not authorised to hold certain client assets. It also missed that WealthTek could not hold client money at all. It opened the accounts anyway, then failed to promptly review and resolve the alerts its own systems raised.
The FCA closed the investigation in 13 months and has now recovered over 57m pounds for WealthTek clients across actions against CACEIS UK, Sapia Partners and Barclays Bank UK. “Strong financial crime controls keep clients’ assets safe,” said Therese Chambers, the FCA’s joint executive director of enforcement. “CACEIS UK’s failures exposed clients to serious risk.”
For merchant acquirers, the read-across is direct. The same pattern, a flag surfaced and then ignored, is exactly how transaction laundering and AML exposure builds inside a live portfolio. Merchant underwriting that ends at approval, rather than continuing as ongoing monitoring, is the gap this case puts a price on.
- Financial Conduct Authority, “CACEIS UK censured and to pay 31.7m pounds to WealthTek clients for weak financial crime controls,” Press Releases, 25 June 2026.