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The Starling Bank banking app on a smartphone.

Adrian Dennis | AFP via Getty Images

U.K. financial regulators hit British digital lender Starling Bank with a £29 million ($38.5 million) fine over failings related to its financial crime prevention systems.

In a statement on Wednesday, London’s Financial Conduct Authority said it had fined Starling “for financial crime failings related to its financial sanctions screening.” Starling also repeatedly breached a requirement not to open accounts for high-risk customers, the FCA said.

In response to the FCA penalty, Starling said it was sorry for the failings outlined by the regulator and that it had completed detailed screening and an in-depth back book review of customer accounts.

“I would like to apologise for the failings outlined by the FCA and to provide reassurance that we have invested heavily to put things right, including strengthening our board governance and capabilities,” David Sproul, chairman of Starling Bank, said in a statement Wednesday.

“We want to assure our customers and employees that these are historic issues. We have learned the lessons of this investigation and are confident that these changes and the strength of our franchise put us in a strong position to continue executing our strategy of safe, sustainable growth, supported by a robust risk management and control framework,” he added.

Starling, one of the U.K.’s most popular online-only challenger banks, has been widely viewed as a potential IPO candidate in the coming year or so. The startup previously signaled plans to go public, but has moved back its expected timing from an earlier targeted an IPO as early as 2023.

The FCA said in a statement that, as Starling expanded from 43,000 customers in 2017 to 3.6 million in 2023, the bank’s measures to tackle financial crimes failed to keep pace with that growth.

The FCA began looking into financial crime controls at digital challenger banks in 2021, concerned that fintech brands’ anti-money laundering and know-your-customer compliance systems weren’t robust enough to prevent fraud, money laundering and sanctions evasion on their platforms.

After this probe was first opened, Starling agreed to stop opening new bank accounts for high-risk customers until it improved its internal controls. However, the FCA says that Starling failed to comply with this provision and opened over 54,000 accounts for 49,000 high-risk customers between September 2021 and November 2023.

In January 2023, Starling became aware that, since 2017, its automated system was only screening clients against a fraction of the full list of individuals and entities subject to financial sanctions, the FCA said, adding that the bank identified systemic issues in its sanctions framework in an internal review.

Since then, Starling has reported multiple potential breaches of financial sanctions to relevant authorities, according to the British regulator.

The FCA said that Starling has already established programs to remediate the breaches it identified and to enhance its wider financial crime control framework.

The British regulator added that its investigation into Starling completed in 14 months from opening, compared to an average of 42 months for cases closed in the calendar year 2023/24.

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Why Jim Cramer wants to load up on more shares of this DuPont spinoff

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Palantir tops estimates, boosts fourth-quarter guidance on AI adoption

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Palantir tops estimates, boosts fourth-quarter guidance on AI adoption

Alex Karp, chief executive officer of Palantir Technologies Inc., speaks during the AIPCon conference in Palo Alto, California, US, on March 13, 2025.

David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Palantir reported quarterly results that topped analysts’ estimates and issued better-than-expected guidance for the fourth quarter, attributing much of its strength to artificial intelligence. The stock rose about 1% in extended trading.

Here’s how the company did compared to LSEG estimates:

Earnings per share: 21 cents adjusted vs. 17 cents expected

Revenues: $1.18 billion vs. $1.09 billion expected

Palantir, which builds analytics tools for large companies and government agencies, said it expects revenue of about $1.33 billion for the current period, exceeding the $1.19 billion expected by analysts, according to LSEG.

The optimistic guidance comes even as the government shutdown stretches into its second calendar month, and potentially threatens some key contracts. Revenue in Palantir’s U.S. government business grew 52% in the quarter from a year ago to $486 million.

Government sales, particularly from military agencies, have been central to Palantir’s ongoing ascent. Over the years, Palantir has steadily beat out major legacy government contractors, and recently landed a deal worth up to $10 billion contract with the U.S. Army.

Palantir has also faced criticism over how its tools are being used by government agencies, including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Total revenue in the quarter jumped 63% from $725.5 million a year ago, exceeding $1 billion for the second straight quarter. Net income more than tripled to $475.6 million, or 18 cents per share, from $143.5 million, or 6 cents per share, a year earlier.

For the full year, Palantir now expects about $4.4 billion in sales, topping the $4.17 billion forecast by Wall Street. The company also bumped up its full-year free cash flow outlook to between $1.9 billion and $2.1 billion.

Palantir’s U.S. commercial business more than doubled to $397 million. Total contract value for U.S. commercial deals closed more than quadrupled to $1.31 billion. Over the last few weeks, the company has announced new partnerships with Snowflake, Lumen and Nvidia.

Retail investors have helped drive Palantir’s skyrocketing stock price to new heights. The shares have surged more than 170% this year, lifting the company’s market cap past $490 billion and cementing the company among the most valuable technology names in the world.

Analysts have raised concerns about the stock, which trades at an extreme multiple relative to technology behemoths with far more revenue. In a letter to shareholders, CEO Alex Karp called out the “detractors” who have been “left in a kind of deranged and self-destructive befuddlement.”

“The reality is that Palantir has made it possible for retail investors to achieve rates of return previously limited to the most successful venture capitalists in Palo Alto,” he wrote. “And we have done so through authentic and substantive growth.”

In an interview with CNBC’s Morgan Brennan on Monday, Karp acknowledged that there’s excess in the AI market today and that some companies are eventually going to feel the pain.

“The strong companies are going to get much stronger, and the people pretending they’re doing stuff are going to disappear very quickly,” Karp said.

WATCH: D.A. Davidson’s Luria on Palantir

Palantir is the best software company and it's not even close, says D.A. Davidson's Gil Luria

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Ether falls 7% following a multimillion dollar hack of a decentralized finance protocol

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Ether falls 7% following a multimillion dollar hack of a decentralized finance protocol

Representation of Ethereum, with its native cryptocurrency ether.

Dado Ruvic | Reuters

Ether fell as much as 9% on Monday, slipping below its critical $3,600 support level, shortly after a multimillion dollar hack affected a protocol on the token’s native network. 

The cryptocurrency, which is issued on Ethereum, was last down 6.6% at around $3,600, CoinMetrics data shows. That’s roughly 25% off its high of $4,885 hit on August 22

The coin’s tumble came after Ethereum-based decentralized finance protocol Balancer on Monday lost possibly more than $100 million in a hack. The exploit marks the latest in a series of bearish events that have put digital assets investors on tenterhooks over the past few weeks.

In mid-October, U.S. President Donald Trump announced “massive” tariffs on China over its restriction of rare earth exports, kicking off investors’ flight from crypto to risk-off assets such as gold. And although the president later walked back that threat, his comments sparked a sell-off that triggered cascading liquidations of highly leveraged digital asset positions

Last week, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell cautioned investors about expecting future rate cuts, adding to existing bearish market sentiment.     

“These events have put investors on uneasy footing as we roll into November,” Juan Leon, senior investment strategist at Bitwise, told CNBC. “Macro volatility notwithstanding, this October’s drawdown appears to have been a healthy, albeit sharp, de-leveraging event that flushed speculative excess from the market.”

Some stocks linked to digital assets are also coming under pressure. Coinbase shares were down nearly 4%, while Bitcoin treasury firm Strategy edged down more than 1%.   

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