The ex leader of the UKIP party Nigel Farage recently had his Coutts bank account closed with originally no reason provided to him.
He went public with this information and the boss of NatWest (Coutts is part of the NatWest group), Dame Alison Rose, herself went public with the news that this had been because he'd failed to meet the bank's eligibility criteria of having at least £1M in his account.
She has since resigned because of this incredibly stupid and obvious breach of GDPR. Technically the bank could be fined up to £17M because of this because she has basically shared someone's personal data publicly, I mean talk about an error of judgement, but then again I guess the basics of GPDR could easily get lost on the bosses, they probably don't pay much attention to such mundane and trivial issues.
That aside, Farage has since managed to get hold of documents which show this was a lie anyway, the real reason for his account being closed was that his xenophobic views were perceived by NatWest as represented a reputational risk to the banking group. The official line is that "his publicly-stated views that were at odds with our position as an inclusive organisation".
The true colours of centralised banking!
The only reason this has gone public is because of Farage waxing about it, and fair play the guy, he's got a point.
I mean don't get me wrong, I detest Nigel Farage's views but to have his account closed because of his political views doesn't sit right with me, especially when he's been given no reason and then publicly lied to.
And I'm afraid this is business as usual for the banking sector. Many Muslim organisations and individuals have had their accounts closed for alleged but unproven links to terrorism.
But of course those persons don't have the political capital to be heard, unlike Farage, who is the outspoken critique of such people at the other end of his political spectrum!
Something worth keeping in mind is the role companies such as World-Check in this process, which is an influential database used by banks globally to help identify and manage financial, regulatory and reputational risk to large companies.
Such institutions which collect data on individuals which is then used against them (potentially) by banks maybe need to be looked at and regulated.
It's a win for crypto!
I understand, as should everyone else, that legacy banking is centralised and they can close anyone's account for any reason outlined in their policies.
Note that the boss of NatWest didn't resign because of closing Farage's account, that's acceptable to them by virtue of their risk-policy, she had to go because of an incredibly stupid breach of GDPR. You can't keep someone on for doing something that could cost the company £20M.
So here we have another case for crypto - user controlled accounts win, literally no one can close those because there is no centralised authority.
Of course technically there are no 'accounts' on distributed ledgers, that's just something front ends label them to make crypto accessible to people with FIAT mindsets, but that's another story!