[luka-birsa]

An subsidary that Binance bought was banned by UK financial regulators to do business in UK. Not Binance itself. This has been cleared up multiple times, but I guess if you repeat the same lie often enough people start believing it.

[grey-area]

Here's the source:

https://www.fca.org.uk/news/news-stories/consumer-warning-bi...

The regulator made it clear that Binance itself, not just the subsidiary was not licensed to pursue any regulated activity in the UK. The confusion (some would say deliberate confusion) has arisen because the application rejected was from BML, but Binance Group itself holds no authorisations to carry out regulated activities with UK customers and has effectively been banned from transacting in the UK. Here is the statement:

Binance Markets Limited is not currently permitted to undertake any regulated activities without the prior written consent of the FCA. No other entity in the Binance Group holds any form of UK authorisation, registration or licence to conduct regulated activity in the UK. The Binance Group appear to be offering UK customers a range of products and services via a website, Binance.com.

This is why UK banks have banned Binance transactions, it's not a conspiracy, it's not a lie, and you should question which news sources led you to believe it was.

[hogFeast]

Right, there are a few problems with this.

One, banks do not have a responsibility to prevent payments going into institutions conducting unregulated activities. There are, literally, hundreds of these institutions doing business in the UK and Barclays is doing nothing (because it is nothing to do with them).

Two, Barclays itself is pretty much ground zero for a regulated institution behaving poorly. Their wealth management arm is notorious for retailing various kinds of unregulated schemes that self-destruct. They have a terrible reputation (although admittedly, this is now different from the UK retail bank...still, their UK retail bank doesn't have a great reputation either). In other contexts, Barclays has actually refused to comply with laws passed by the UK govt...so this is a very suspicious change in position from them.

Three, only some of the activities that Binance is conducting are regulated (i.e. those crypto derivatives which are classified as securities). The logical conclusion for this is not to ask UK banks to stop payments towards that entity (or for those banks to unilaterally decide to do that themselves) because Binance is also conducting activities which are unregulated, and those payments shouldn't be blocked (particularly because these are a payment function for some people, has the UK's payment system been shut down because some people use it for fraud? No).

This is not unusual. UK banks, for reasons known only to themselves, have begun to block payments to other companies that they don't like. Starling attempted to introduce an opt-in for gambling transactions (totally legal and regulated in the UK). There is no precedent for this. It is not the function of banks to decide who you should pay (and btw, the reason why this has started happening, imo, is because they have become liable for hacks...I have an account with a UK bank, and it is actually difficult for me to send money to anyone because there is so much compliance...and I had to get an account with another bank just so I can send money...at the bottom of everything with UK banks is money).

[loeg]

Don't assume bad faith. The banned subsidiary is also named Binance.