Award-Winning UK Bank ‘Starling’ Says ‘We Consider Crypto Activity To Be High Risk’

One of UK’s top digital banks says that it has “taken the decision to prevent all card payments to crypto merchants and to implement further restrictions on outgoing and incoming transfers.”

London-headquartered Starling Bank is a licensed and regulated bank founded by former Allied Irish Banks COO Anne Boden in January 2014. According to Wikipedia, it received the Best British Bank award in the British Bank Awards for four consecutive years – 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021.

However, it seems that in the last couple of days, Starliong Bank has adopted a negative stance toward crypto, as you can see from some of the recent interactions with customers on Twitter:

Crypto educator and influencer Layah Heilpern had this to say:

According to a report by Cointelegraph, a spokesperson for the bank told them that the “bank has had restrictions of ‘varying degrees’ on transactions related to cryptocurrency for some time.”

Apparently, this representative said:

“We recently tightened restrictions on inbound and outbound transactions by card and bank transfer… The innovative technology, and thinking, behind cryptocurrencies have great potential advantages. However, right now, they are high risk and heavily used for criminal purposes and, as such, we no longer support them.”

Earlier this month, Santander UK, which is a British bank wholly owned by Spanish multinational financial services firm Santander Group, started advising its customers that there would soon be limits imposed on payments to crypto exchanges.

According to a notice (on the company’s website) aimed at customers, the bank has seen “a large increase in UK customers become victims of cryptocurrency fraud”, and so to “protect” their customers, they have decided to place limits on payments to cryptocurrency exchanges.

From 15 November 2022, for Mobile Banking and Online Banking payments to crypto exchanges, the maximum amount per transaction were limited to GBP 1,000 (£1,000) and the maximum total amount over any “rolling 30-day period” to GBP 3,000 (£3,000). However, there are no limits on payments from crypto exchanges to customer accounts.

The notice went on to say:

“We’ll continue to stop payments being sent to Binance. This follows the FCA’s warning to consumers about this cryptocurrency exchange and is to help protect you against fraud. You can still withdraw any money you have with Binance into your Santander account.“