40% of UK Bank-to-Exchange Transfers Are Blocked, Policy Group Tells Parliament

Roughly 40% of bank-to-exchange transfers in the United Kingdom are currently blocked or delayed, according to evidence Bitcoin Policy UK has submitted to the parliamentary inquiry into banking access run by the Crypto and Digital Assets APPG.

The group's headline finding is stasis: nearly three years after it first raised blanket banking restrictions with the City Minister, the data shows no improvement in how British banks treat lawful bitcoin activity.

One word, many assets

The group locates the root cause in taxonomy. UK policy treats "crypto" as a single category, so bitcoin gets caught by rules written for unbacked speculative tokens and issuer-dependent stablecoins — asset types with fundamentally different risk profiles. The government has said since 2023 that banks should assess activity case by case rather than de-risk an entire sector; the submission's argument is that practice never followed the guidance, and that the gap is widening as the UK moves toward full implementation of its cryptoasset regime in 2027.

Bitcoin Policy UK is asking for something modest: that banks be required to give reasons when they reject bitcoin-related activity, replacing silent blanket blocks with reviewable decisions.

The competitiveness subtext

The inquiry lands at an awkward moment for London's fintech story. The US is legislating market structure, the EU's MiCA regime is operational, and the UK — early to talk about becoming a crypto hub — still has retail customers unable to move money to regulated exchanges reliably. A 40% failure rate on the basic banking rail is not a fraud-prevention statistic; it is a market-access statistic.

Whether Parliament converts the evidence into pressure is the open question. Banks answer to the FCA's expectations on fraud liability, and until those expectations distinguish bitcoin from the tokens the rules were written for, the blocking is rational behavior. The fix, as the submission implies, is upstream of the banks.