UK Lawmakers Ask Banks About Crypto Rules Already Public Online

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Twelve of the fourteen UK banks and fintechs named in a January 2026 industry survey already publish exact limits on cryptocurrency payments on their own websites. That is the picture that emerges from checking each provider’s current terms against the questions the UK Parliament’s Crypto and Digital Assets APPG put to bank chief executives in a letter dated 11 August 2026.

The letter, signed by APPG co-chairs Gurinder Singh Josan and Lord Vaizey of Didcot, asks banks six things: what their crypto policy is, whether they serve crypto firms, what transaction restrictions apply, what drives those restrictions, whether the UK’s incoming crypto regime will change any of it, and what government or regulators could do to help. The first three of those questions have detailed public answers already. The last three do not, because they depend on decisions banks haven’t made yet or reasoning they haven’t published.

The letter quotes Economic Secretary to the Treasury Lucy Rigby telling Parliament earlier this year that licensed firms should not face restrictions “simply because of the sector they belong to.” It also follows a pattern. In 2023, the APPG’s then chair, Lisa Cameron, wrote separately to the Treasury and to UK Finance raising the same banking access problem, a year after an earlier APPG inquiry had flagged it. Four years on, the issue is the subject of a fresh formal inquiry, with written evidence due by 31 August 2026.

What the banks’ own pages say

Chase UK blocks every outgoing payment it identifies as a crypto transaction, according to its own support page, while still allowing money in from exchanges. HSBC UK caps crypto payments at £2,500 per transaction and £10,000 across any rolling 30 days, on both bank transfers and debit cards, per its official page. NatWest set a £1,000 daily and £5,000 monthly limit when it announced the restriction in March 2023, saying it wanted to stop customers losing “life changing sums of money” to scams. Nationwide allows £1,000 a day on debit card purchases and transfers combined, blocks credit card crypto purchases entirely, and blocks payments to Binance specifically regardless of amount. Santander caps transfers at £1,000 per transaction and £3,000 over 30 days, and blocks Binance payments where it can identify them. Monzo introduced a £5,000 rolling 30-day allowance in April, its help page confirms.

Barclays applies the same limits as HSBC, £2,500 per transaction and £10,000 over 30 days, according to the UK Cryptoasset Business Council’s own survey published in January 2026. Starling told customers in a public statement that it would “prevent all card payments to crypto merchants” and restrict transfers in both directions. Metro Bank said in a spokesperson statement that from November 2024 it stopped processing “outbound payments to known Crypto Exchanges” across all its products, while still accepting incoming funds.

For two banks, the only current source is the Council’s own survey. TSB’s public comments have focused on Binance-linked fraud since 2021; the January 2026 survey lists TSB as blocking crypto payments outright. Virgin Money’s restriction was reported in 2018 as limited to credit card purchases; the same survey now lists it as a full block on both transfers and debit cards, suggesting the policy has hardened since then.

Where the 40% figure comes from

The statistic driving much of the coverage around this letter, that 40% of transfers to crypto exchanges are blocked or delayed, comes from a survey the UK Cryptoasset Business Council ran of ten exchanges: Coinbase, Kraken, Uphold, Xapo Bank, Zumo, Wirex, OKX, Luno, Bitpanda and Gemini. The Council is itself a trade body representing the UK crypto industry. Eighty percent of the exchanges it surveyed said blocked or limited transfers had increased over the past 12 months, and none reported an improvement. One exchange told the Council it had recorded close to £1 billion in declined transactions attributable to bank rejections over a year, a figure the Council says covers only transactions it can directly observe and likely understates the true total once manually entered transfers are included.

The Council’s report goes further than the statistics, arguing that blanket restrictions may breach Regulation 105 of the Payment Services Regulations 2017, which requires banks to assess payment restrictions case by case rather than apply blanket bans, along with the FCA’s Consumer Duty and the Competition Act 1998.

The inquiry’s evidence window closes on 31 August 2026. None of the banks named in this piece had issued a public response to the APPG’s letter at the time of writing. The FCA’s new cryptoasset regime becomes fully mandatory on 25 October 2027.