UK regulator FCA has suspended ePayments operations due to anti-money-laundering controls, freezing a million accounts.
EPayments Systems Ltd, a United Kingdom-authorized electronic money institution, must suspend online payment operations due to the Financial Conduct Authority’s anti-money-laundering (AML) procedures.
EPayments has released a short statement on its website and has sent out emails to its customers to give a few details on the FCA’s regulatory checks. This regulation has frozen ePayments one million user accounts and has banned new account openings.
“Following discussions with the FCA, ePayments has agreed to suspend activity on customer accounts until remedial action has been undertaken to the satisfaction of the FCA.”
The FCA has allowed ePayments to provide services including issuing virtual accounts with IBAN, prepaid cards, processing payments, issuing e-money and handling electronic money wallets throughout the European Union since its initial launch.
Yet, with the current ban, customers will be unable to transfer, deal, withdraw or deposit funds and will be unable to use their ePayments cards.
EPayments’ history with cryptocurrency
The team behind ePayments was involved with a crypto exchange Digital Securities Exchange early on, when cryptocurrency was not regulated as heavily in the U.K. Early ePayments customers could use the platform to exchange fiat and crypto.
As ePayments users were obliged to pass KYC procedures and disclose ID information before setting up their accounts, the specifics behind the recent shutdown by the FCA remain unclear.
Cointelegraph reported last month that the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) is now the United Kingdom’s sole AML authority for the crypto business. After a decade of compliance under a laissez-faire approach to AML legislation, U.K.-based crypto firms now face a significantly more stringent set of rules.
