In a rather surprising move, Netherlands-based Rabobank announced on May 23 that they were canceling plans to offer cryptocurrency services as part of their normal banking operations. This came a little over a year after they had announced their plans to offer cryptocurrency wallets.
When the bank first announced their plans, they wanted to try to bridge the gap between common fiat bank accounts and cryptocurrency wallets. The goal was to offer a full-service opportunity for customers where they would not only be able to have one financial institution offer all of the services they needed, whether fiat or digital, but to also be able to integrate the two types of accounts so transactions between the accounts could occur seamlessly.
After consultation with its customers, Rabobank concluded that this was not the time to offer these services. It was not as much that customers did not want the services, but that the regulations involved would likely have made this more of a nightmare for customers.
“For instance, Dutch authorities, AFM (market conduct supervision) and DNB (Dutch central bank, financial stability) recommend regulations of cryptos at an international level,” the spokesperson told Hard Fork.
The other problem that the institution found was that many customers were skeptical of the validity of the service. According to a spokesman for the bank, many thought that the accounts were fake at first.
Rabobank is not the only financial institution to scrap these kinds of plans. On May 23, ANB AMRO concluded that they would also not be offering cryptocurrency wallets as part of their services.
Government regulation appears to have been a factor for ANB AMRO as well. Dutch authorities have promised to create standards governing cryptocurrency regulations, but those plans have not been revealed as of this date. That has created too much of an uncertainty for these two financial institutions, who have decided is to their advantage to simply wait for now.
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