Nationwide to restrict crypto payments after FTX chaos

Nation­wide is to launch a fresh crack­down on cryp­tocur­ren­cy, as high street lenders tight­en con­trols in the wake of the col­lapse of FTX.

A Nation­wide spokesman told The Tele­graph: “To help pro­tect our mem­bers from cryp­tocur­ren­cy scams, the soci­ety is plan­ning to intro­duce a dai­ly lim­it on pay­ments to cryp­to assets in the near future. We will update mem­bers when the changes are brought in.”

Nation­wide, the world’s largest build­ing soci­ety with 16 mil­lion mem­bers, cur­rent­ly has no pay­ment lim­its on cryp­tocur­ren­cy, although it does lim­it its “faster pay­ments” ser­vice to sums of £10,000.

The planned pol­i­cy change from Nation­wide fol­lows sim­i­lar recent restric­tions intro­duced at Star­ling Bank, San­tander and Vir­gin Money.

On Tues­day, Star­ling Bank sent a note to cus­tomers inform­ing them that they may not be able to with­draw mon­ey from cryp­tocur­ren­cy exchanges to their account. Star­ling Bank said: “We’ve tak­en the deci­sion to pre­vent all card pay­ments to cryp­to mer­chants and to imple­ment fur­ther restric­tions on out­go­ing and incom­ing transfers.”

San­tander has placed a lim­it of £1,000 per trans­ac­tion to dig­i­tal coin exchanges and £3,000 per month.

This week, Vir­gin Mon­ey intro­duced a block on cryp­to pay­ments to exchanges from per­son­al and sav­ings accounts.

Last year, TSB became the first major bank to ban cus­tomers from send­ing any pay­ments to cryp­tocur­ren­cy exchanges.