[2018-03-11]Finnish Crypto Exchange Risks Collapse As Banks Refuse To Do Busines

[Diced90]

Finnish cryptocurrency exchange and crypto wallet services provider Prasos Oy is one step from being “frozen”, as most Finnish banks will no longer conduct business with them, Bloomberg reports March 9.

Founded in 2012, Prasos has seen a ten-fold spike of transaction volumes reaching $185 mln in 2017, which became a subject of concern among the banks.

Finnish banks do not have a codified set of regulations surrounding cryptocurrencies and the anonymous nature of cryptocurrency transactions could potentially run afoul of current Finnish anti-money laundering laws (AML). As a result, four banks; S-Bank, the OP Group, Saastopankki, and Nordea Bank AB closed Prasos Oy’s accounts in 2017. For now, Prasos has to manage all its clients’ transactions through one bank.

Tomi Narhinen, CEO of Saastopankki, commented that the anonymous character of crypto operations breaches the AML laws of the European Union (EU).

“In most cases it’s practically impossible or at least very hard to do business with cryptocurrency dealers and exchanges, because it can be impossible to determine the origin of the funds,” said Narhinen.

https://cointelegraph.com/news/finnish-crypto-exchange-risks-collapse-as-banks-refuse-to-do-business

[davis196]

This is confusing.Why would a cryptocurrency exchange platform do business with banks?
I thought that crypto exchange marketplaces do not depend on the mercy of the bankers.
One of the biggest crypto marketplaces-Localbitcoins is located in Finland and i would be worried ,if they have to shut down their business due to the anti-money laundering laws.I do most of my crypto transactions on localbitcoins.Anyway,i`ve never heard anything about this Prasos Oy company.

[jjacob]

Banks seem to be hiding behind the Anti-Money Laundering  rules in place in the EU, whenever they decide to close the cryptocurrency accounts of exchanges. But it does seem strange that in some countries, exchanges seem to be flourishing while in others banks are acting against them. Finnish banks are shutting accounts, while in Luxembourg, Bitstamp is a registered exchange. In today's globalized world, customers will just move to an exchange abroad.