As they prepare to swallow a new tax – set to drive up borrowing costs for small businesses – British banks are preventing customers from sending their own money to FCA-registered crypto platforms, according to new data from the campaign Stand With Crypto UK. It’s a cartel business…
Over 90 days between May and August, 9,803 people sent a formal complaint to their banks after transfers were blocked or capped. Complaints came from all 650 constituencies and no single seat accounts for more than 0.5% of the total number. It’s not just a London problem, then…
Banks with caps received the most complaints overall. Lloyds group, which includes Halifax and Bank of Scotland, tops the table with 2,297 complaints. Lloyds has no published policy restricting crypto transfers, and it is promoting its own tokenisation work at the same time…
The data comes a month after UK Finance, the banks’ trade body, removed its only crypto exchange member Coinbase. Katie Harries, Director of Policy for Europe at Coinbase, said:
“The FCA has started accepting licence applications from crypto firms, and the government wants the UK to lead in digital assets… If Britain wants the benefits of digital finance, it must permit people to access it. A country cannot credibly invite innovators in while allowing its banks to lock consumers out.”
The Stand With Crypto campaign wants banks to drop blanket blocks and caps in favour of case-by-case checks, and to publish policies on when and why transfers get stopped. Harry Pearce Gould, its General Manager, said:
“They’re ordinary people being stopped from making lawful transfers to FCA-registered platforms. They’ve done their part by speaking up. Now banks and policymakers need to listen.”
Read the full league table of banks with most complaints below:
1. Lloyds Banking Group – 2,297
2. Barclays – 1,569
3. NatWest/RBS – 1,278
4. HSBC UK – 1,048
5. Monzo – 962
6. Santander UK – 790
7. Nationwide – 556
8. Revolut – 545
9. Starling Bank – 343
10. TSB – 214
11. Chase UK – 147
12. Metro Bank – 106
13. Virgin Money – 103
14. Co-operative Bank – 76
Robert Jenrick on the Today programme:
“Can you now give a guarantee to your listeners this morning that no BBC presenter in the future will be exposed as a paedophile, as a number have been in the recent past? No, of course you can’t…”