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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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Tesla shares drop 5% in premarket after Cybercab robotaxi reveal fails to impress

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Tesla shares drop 5% in premarket after Cybercab robotaxi reveal fails to impress

Tesla unveils its “Cybercab” on October 10, 2024 in Burbank, California.

Shares of electric vehicle maker Tesla sank after the company’s long-awaited robotaxi event — where CEO Elon Musk  unveiled the firm’s Cybercab self-driving concept car  — failed to impress investors.

Tesla stock was down 5% as of 4:45 a.m. ET in premarket trading on Friday.

– CNBC’s Michael Bloom contributed to this report

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Salesforce’s UK chief urges government not to regulate all AI companies in the same way

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Salesforce's UK chief urges government not to regulate all AI companies in the same way

Zahra Bahrololoumi, CEO of U.K. and Ireland at Salesforce, speaking during the company’s annual Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, California, on Sept. 17, 2024.

David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

LONDON — The UK chief executive of Salesforce wants the Labor government to regulate artificial intelligence — but says it’s important that policymakers don’t tar all technology companies developing AI systems with the same brush.

Speaking to CNBC in London, Zahra Bahrololoumi, CEO of UK and Ireland at Salesforce, said the American enterprise software giant takes all legislation “seriously.” However, she added that any British proposals aimed at regulating AI should be “proportional and tailored.”

Bahrololoumi noted that there’s a difference between companies developing consumer-facing AI tools — like OpenAI — and firms like Salesforce making enterprise AI systems. She said consumer-facing AI systems, such as ChatGPT , face fewer restrictions than enterprise-grade products, which have to meet higher privacy standards and comply with corporate guidelines.

“What we look for is targeted, proportional, and tailored legislation,” Bahrololoumi told CNBC on Wednesday.

“There’s definitely a difference between those organizations that are operating with consumer facing technology and consumer tech, and those that are enterprise tech. And we each have different roles in the ecosystem, [but] we’re a B2B organization,” she said.

A spokesperson for the UK’s Department of Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) said that planned AI rules would be “highly targeted to the handful of companies developing the most powerful AI models,” rather than applying “blanket rules on the use of AI. “

That indicates that the rules might not apply to companies like Salesforce, which don’t make their own foundational models like OpenAI.

“We recognize the power of AI to kickstart growth and improve productivity and are absolutely committed to supporting the development of our AI sector, particularly as we speed up the adoption of the technology across our economy,” the DSIT spokesperson added.

Data security

AI concerns ‘apply at all levels’

Bola Rotibi, chief of enterprise research at analyst firm CCS Insight, told CNBC that, while enterprise-focused AI suppliers are “more cognizant of enterprise-level requirements” around security and data privacy, it would be wrong to assume regulations wouldn’t scrutinize both consumer and business-facing firms.

“All the concerns around things like consent, privacy, transparency, data sovereignty apply at all levels no matter if it is consumer or enterprise as such details are governed by regulations such as GDPR,” Rotibi told CNBC via email. GDPR, or the General Data Protection Regulation, became law in the UK in 2018.

However, Rotibi said that regulators may feel “more confident” in AI compliance measures adopted by enterprise application providers like Salesforce, “because they understand what it means to deliver enterprise-level solutions and management support.”

“A more nuanced review process is likely for the AI services from widely deployed enterprise solution providers like Salesforce,” she added.

Bahrololoumi spoke to CNBC at Salesforce’s Agentforce World Tour in London, an event designed to promote the use of the company’s new “agentic” AI technology by partners and customers.

Her remarks come after U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labour refrained from introducing an AI bill in the King’s Speech, which is written by the government to outline its priorities for the coming months. The government at the time said it plans to establish “appropriate legislation” for AI, without offering further details.

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Elon Musk hypes $30,000 Tesla self-driving Cybercab and larger Robovan at robotaxi event

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Tesla shares drop 5% in premarket after Cybercab robotaxi reveal fails to impress

Elon Musk unveils the Cybercab at Tesla robotaxi event

After a decade of unfulfilled promises about driverless vehicles, Tesla CEO Elon Musk hyped the company’s Cybercab concept on Thursday night, showing off a low, silver two-seater with no steering wheels or pedals.

Rolling up to the stage in a Cybercab almost an hour after the company’s “We, Robot” event was supposed to begin, Musk said the company had 21 of these vehicles, and a total of 50 “autonomous” cars on-location at the Warner Bros. studio in Burbank, California where Tesla hosted its invitation-only event.

Musk offered no details about exactly where Tesla plans to produce the cars, but said consumers would be able to buy a Tesla Cybercab for below $30,000. He said the company hopes to be producing the Cybercab before 2027

He also said he expects Tesla to have “unsupervised FSD” up and running in Texas and California next year in the company’s Model 3 and Model Y electric vehicles.

FSD, which stands for Full Self-Driving, is Tesla’s premium driver assistance system, available today in a “supervised” version for Tesla electric vehicles. FSD currently requires a human driver at the wheel, ready to steer or brake at any time. Earlier this year, Tesla tacked “supervised” onto the product name.

“It’s going to be a glorious future,” Musk said on Thursday night.

Musk also revealed plans to produce an autonomous, electric Robovan that can carry up to 20 people, or be used to transport goods. He said it will “solve for high density,” transporting a sports team, for example.

He said the Cybercab and Robovan would employ inductive charging, meaning these autonomous vehicles could roll up to a station to recharge, with no plugging in required.

Tesla unveils its RoboVan at the We, Robot event on October 10, 2024.

Musk has spent years touting Tesla’s work in autonomous cars and promising that they would hit the market. Along the way, he’s repeatedly woven a fantastical vision for shareholders, setting and missing his own deadlines.

In 2015, Musk told shareholders that Tesla cars would achieve “full autonomy” within three years. They didn’t. In 2016, Musk said a Tesla car would be able to make a cross-country drive without requiring any human intervention before the end of 2017. That never happened. And in 2019, on a call with institutional investors that would help him raise more than $2 billion, Musk said Tesla would have 1 million robotaxi-ready vehicles on the road in 2020, able to complete 100 hours of driving work per week each, making money for their owners.

In April this year, Musk was still telling investors autonomy is the company’s future.

“If somebody doesn’t believe Tesla’s going to solve autonomy, I think they should not be an investor in the company,” he said on a call with analysts. “We will, and we are.”

At Thursday night’s event, which he previously characterized as a “product launch,” Musk welcomed attendees to the “party,” and said they would be able to take test rides in the autonomous vehicles on location, in the closed environment of the movie studio lots.

It was Tesla’s first product unveiling since the company first showed off the design for its Cybertruck in 2019. The angular steel pickup began shipping to customers in late 2023, and has been the subject of five voluntary recalls since then in the U.S.

WATCH: Elon Musk unveils the Tesla Robovan

Watch Elon Musk unveil Tesla's Robovan

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