Nationwide Building Society

In December 2025 the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) fined Nationwide Building Society £44,078,500 for weaknesses in its financial crime controls between October 2016 and July 2021. Nationwide did not keep customer due diligence and risk assessments up to date for its personal current account customers, and its transaction monitoring was ineffective; it also knew some customers were running businesses through personal accounts in breach of its terms but had no proper process to manage the extra risk. In one serious case the society missed chances to spot a customer using personal accounts to receive over £27m in fraudulent Covid furlough payments. Nationwide, which had reported the problems itself and cooperated, agreed to settle and received a 30% discount; the fine would otherwise have been £62,969,297.

On 14 February 2007 the Financial Services Authority (FSA) fined Nationwide Building Society £980,000 for breaching Principle 3 (which requires firms to take reasonable care to organise and control their affairs responsibly and effectively, with adequate risk‑management systems) in the period 1 December 2004 to 1 December 2006. The FSA found Nationwide had weak information‑security risk assessment, inadequate procedures, training and controls, and a poor incident response after a laptop containing customer information was stolen, exposing customers to the risk of financial crime. Nationwide qualified for a 30% early‑settlement discount (the FSA said the undiscounted penalty would have been £1.4m) and had taken mitigating steps including disabling remote access, writing to customers, offering to reimburse customers who proved financial loss, increasing anti‑fraud monitoring and commissioning an independent review of its information security.