The co-chairs of the UK Parliament’s Crypto and Digital Assets All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) wrote to the chief executives of all major UK banks on 11 August 2026, demanding a formal account of their approach to serving licensed crypto and digital asset businesses. The letter, signed by Gurinder Singh Josan CBE MP and Lord Vaizey of Didcot, marks the most direct parliamentary intervention yet in what has become a persistent structural tension between the UK’s traditional banking sector and its emerging digital asset industry.

The questions put to bank CEOs

The APPG’s letter poses six specific questions covering whether banks hold policies on serving crypto firms, what restrictions exist on crypto-related transactions for both retail and business customers, the regulatory and commercial logic behind those restrictions, and whether the forthcoming UK crypto licensing regime is expected to change any of those positions. Banks are also asked whether specific government or regulatory actions could make it easier for them to serve what the letter calls “legitimate UK crypto and digital asset businesses.”

The scope of the inquiry is broad. When the APPG refers to digital asset firms it includes exchanges, custodians, payment firms, wallet providers, tokenisation businesses and stablecoin issuers, reflecting the full breadth of entity types expected to operate under the new FCA authorisation framework once it comes into force.

The parliamentary letter carries notable political weight. Economic Secretary to the Treasury Lucy Rigby MP is quoted as having told Parliament earlier this year that the government “would not expect” FCA-licensed crypto firms “to be subject to restrictions by banking services providers simply because of the sector they belong to.” That statement aligns the executive branch with the APPG’s position and adds pressure on banks to justify blanket sector-based restrictions rather than case-by-case risk assessments.

Regulatory context and what comes next

The backdrop is the UK’s forthcoming comprehensive crypto regulatory regime, under which firms must obtain FCA authorisation to provide cryptoasset services. The APPG argues that banking access could be “one of the single biggest barriers to growth” for those firms and could deter international companies from locating in the UK. It draws a distinction between a bank’s legitimate anti-financial crime obligations and what it characterises as blunt sector-wide derisking that does not reflect an individual firm’s compliance standing.

The debanking issue is not unique to digital assets. Several other sectors, including payments firms and money services businesses, have faced similar difficulties accessing or retaining UK bank accounts. What makes the crypto case more acute, the APPG contends, is the sheer number of affected firms and the potential for the problem to undermine a regulatory framework the government has invested significant political capital in building.

The APPG stressed that its letter does not pre-empt the findings of an inquiry it launched last month into the scale and drivers of banking access problems. Banks are invited to contribute alongside other stakeholders, and the group has indicated it intends an evidence-based assessment rather than a predetermined outcome.

The practical question for the sector is whether the parliamentary inquiry, backed by Treasury-level statements, is sufficient to shift bank risk appetite on their own, or whether formal regulatory guidance from the FCA or the Prudential Regulation Authority will be needed to create a clear safe harbour for banks serving licensed digital asset clients. Several other jurisdictions, including the UAE through its VARA and DFSA frameworks, have moved to clarify precisely this relationship between licensed digital asset firms and incumbent banking institutions, and the UK will be watching whether its own approach achieves the same commercial result.

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