UK Bank Santander Will Block Payments to Crypto Exchanges

UK bank San­tander is set to block real-time pay­ments to cryp­to exchanges next year.

Accord­ing to an email to cus­tomers first report­ed by Reuters, the move is intend­ed to pro­tect con­sumers from scams. 

San­tander has not said when in 2023 the change will take effect. In the short term, the bank is going to enforce a more lim­it­ed set of restric­tions.

From Novem­ber 15 onwards, pay­ments to cryp­tocur­ren­cy exchanges using mobile and online bank­ing will be lim­it­ed to £1,000 per trans­ac­tion with a total lim­it of £3,000 in any rolling 30-day period. 

The new rules will not impact the abil­i­ty of cus­tomers to make withdrawals.

“In recent months we’ve seen a large increase in UK cus­tomers becom­ing vic­tims of cryp­tocur­ren­cy fraud,” said a San­tander spokesper­son. “We want to do every­thing we can to pro­tect our cus­tomers and we feel that lim­it­ing pay­ments to cryp­tocur­ren­cy exchanges is the best way to make sure your mon­ey stays safe.”

San­tander will con­tin­ue to block pay­ments being sent to Binance, in line with the UK Finan­cial Con­duct Author­i­ty’s (FCA) harsh stance on the exchange, which was banned from oper­at­ing in the UK in 2021 by the watch­dog group. The FCA claimed the firm is “not capa­ble of being effec­tive­ly super­vised” and its “com­plex and high-risk finan­cial prod­ucts” pose a sig­nif­i­cant risk to consumers.

Santander’s pol­i­cy seems to be in line with the FCA’s cau­tious recent approach to crypto. 

In August 2022, the FCA announced plans to tight­en up its rules on cryp­to adver­tis­ing sig­nif­i­cant­ly, bring­ing these in line with the reg­u­la­tions gov­ern­ing tra­di­tion­al secu­ri­ties such as stocks and bonds. 

San­tander isn’t exact­ly unique among the British High Street banks in tak­ing a pro­hib­i­tive approach to cryp­to transfers. 

Almost half—47 percent—of the UK’s major banks do not sup­port cryp­tocur­ren­cy accord­ing to data from the price com­par­i­son site Finder.

This group is main­ly com­posed of tra­di­tion­al high street banks such as Lloyds, Nation­wide, HSBC, and TSB Bank, but also includes some of the new­er crop of “chal­lenger banks” such as Star­ling Bank.

But not all UK banks are pulling back from cryp­to. Neobank Rev­o­lut, which has been oper­at­ing in the UK since 2015, recent­ly launched a card that allows users to pay in cryp­to for their goods and services. 

Revolut’s “spend from cryp­to” fea­ture enables users to choose cryp­to from over 1,000 tokens and enables users to get cash back on their purchases.