Santander denies it is blocking payments to Coinbase or any legitimate company. This comes after an unverified report released by a Reddit user claiming that a Santander representative in the United Kingdom informed customers would not be able to deposit money to Coinbase. In a conversation with Cointelegraph, the bank confirmed they continue offering services to send funds to Coinbase. 

Santander Bank Works With Coinbase

According to the Reddit user iCheat69, he talked with a Santander representative in the United Kingdom that informed him that they will no longer be allowing customers to deposit money to Coinbase. He has also mentioned that the complaints department confirmed that he should move to an alternative bank to make a transfer to Coinbase.

Coinbase is one of the largest and most recognized exchanges in the world. It has been operating for several years and it offers a very straightforward way to acquire digital assets. 

A Santander U.K. spokesperson commented to Cointelegraph:

“We do not block payments to any legitimate company, however in certain circumstances, we will refer payments for additional security checks, where we believe there may be a higher risk of fraud.”

Some of the other Redditors informed that they were not affected by this issue and that they were able to send payments to Coinbase. Another user said that Santander didn’t accept withdrawals from BitStamp in Portugal and Spain. 

A few days ago, Yahoo! Finance informed that Barclays was no longer offering banking services to Coinbase. This affected users because the bank allowed Coinbase to have access to the U.K. Faster Payments Scheme (FPS), allowing users to instantly withdraw and deposit British pounds at the exchange. 

According to iCheat69, the measures that were taken by Santander could be temporary until Coinbase improves its fraud prevention. Cryptocurrency exchanges and other crypto-related companies have been operating in the market but they had issues to receive services from banks and other traditional financial institutions. This happens because the market needs to become more mature, it needs to have better regulations and its reputation should also improve. 

Now, Coinbase is expected to have access to the FPS through another banking institution called Clearbank, a smaller bank that entered the market and is currently trying to expand. 

At the time of writing this article, Coinbase Pro had a trading volume in the last 24 hours of $639 million.