Crypto firms have spent years trying to convince banks they're safe to do business with. Even now, with far more regulation in place than a few years ago, plenty of those firms still get turned away at the door.
Jelizaveta Paskovskaja, Money Laundering Reporting Officer at CryptoProcessing by Coinspaid, says the core problem runs deeper than reputation. Regulators have drawn clearer lines around what's allowed—the EU's Markets in Crypto Regulation (MiCA), the U.S. split between the SEC, CFTC, and FinCEN—but banks themselves remain reluctant. Even when a crypto firm meets every legal requirement, an internal credit committee can still reject it outright.
The friction is structural. Banks don't lose money if they turn away a legitimate crypto customer; they do lose money if they get caught moving funds that trip a sanctions filter or end up in a compliance failure. That asymmetry pushes lenders toward blanket refusals. Paskovskaja points out that stablecoin issuers and crypto payment processors face the toughest squeeze. These firms are most dependent on banking relationships to move fiat on and off ramps, but they're also the ones banks fear most.
When a bank does agree to work with a crypto outfit, the terms are rarely friendly. Premium fees, higher reserve requirements, and tighter monitoring become standard. Correspondent banking—the network that allows banks to settle with each other across borders—has become another chokepoint. Smaller regional lenders often can't access correspondent channels for crypto-related transactions, which effectively cuts them out of the market.
Regulation hasn't closed this gap because regulation and banking appetite are different things. A firm can be fully compliant with MiCA or FinCEN guidance and still find itself locked out by commercial decisions made in a bank's risk department. The compliance framework gives crypto companies a legal foothold, but it doesn't force banks to take the commercial risk of serving them.