Coinbase UK resurrects fast payments with banking partner ClearBank
Coinbase's UK customers can once again make fast payment transfers to the cryptocurrency exchange, according to a Bloomberg report.
In August, reports surfaced that UK financial service giant Barclays had stopped providing banking services to Coinbase. At that time, Coinbase became a client of ClearBank, a UK banking startup. However, because of the change in partnership, Coinbase lost access to the UK's Faster Payments Scheme (FPS), which allowed its users to instantly deposit and withdraw British pounds at the exchange.
According to Bloomberg's sources, after three months of losing the FPS service, Coinbase has resumed offering the feature to its customers. Zeeshan Feroz, the firm’s UK chief executive officer, told Bloomberg that Coinbase's institutional and retail customers could soon make deposits or withdrawals in less than 60 seconds.
“It’s a very nascent industry that is broadly unregulated so the challenge a traditional bank has is crypto doesn’t fit into one of its existing models for other industries,” Feroz tells Bloomberg. “Understanding the crypto space and how you manage the risk requires a significant amount of investment and resources. As we look at the long term, that gap between crypto and traditional banks will be bridged.”