Starling Bank is no longer supporting crypto transactions for its customers following a review of its position on “financial crime”.
The challenger bank implemented the ban yesterday, sending users a notification through the Starling app.
The London-based fintech wrote on Twitter: “We always review our position in relation to financial crime. We consider crypto activity to be high-risk. We’ve taken the decision to prevent all card payments to crypto merchants and to implement further restrictions on outgoing and incoming transfers.”
A spokesperson from Starling told UKTN: “Starling has had restrictions of varying degrees on crypto transactions for some time, like many other banks.
“We recently tightened restrictions on inbound and outbound transactions by card and bank transfer. Today’s message was to make sure that customers who have made such transactions in the past, but not recently, are aware of this.”
The spokesperson said cryptocurrencies had “innovative technology and thinking” behind them and “great potential advantages”, however, the current state of the industry had too much risk and is “heavily used for criminal purposes and, as such, we no longer support them”.
The cryptoasset market has experienced extreme volatility this year, including the recent collapse of FTX, one of the world’s largest crypto exchanges.
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