On Wednesday (June 17), Reuters reported that Binance is preparing to launch, later this summer, a new dedicated crypto trading platform for UK residents.

According to Reuters’ report, this platform “was designed to allow both institutional and retail investors to buy and sell cryptocurrencies using pounds and euros,” and it will be regulated by UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA).

The report went on to say that Binance is considering up to 65 cryptoassets for this launch.

Apparently, Binance’s upcoming UK platform will support deposit/withdrawals for buying/selling of crypto via UK’s Faster Payments service for GBP transfers and Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA), which is “a payment-integration initiative of the European Union for simplification of bank transfers denominated in euro”, in the case of EUR transfers, 

Teana Baker-Taylor, who joined Binance as its UK director on May 6, told Reuters:

“Interest and participation in the UK digital asset markets is growing; not just in-depth with its current participants, but also in breadth.

“As crypto services mature and evolve, we’re able to create new options to engage and capture interest from a wider audience with varying risk appetites, such as products that earn a yield for participation, like staking and passive savings.”

In the past, Binance has “established joint ventures with leading global partners in Singapore, Korea, Uganda, Jersey and the United States to create fiat-to-cryptocurrency trading platforms.”

In a blog post Binance published last month, it said that its new UK director would be “developing Binance’s presence in the U.K. and leading expansion across the European region,” and that Baker-Taylor would also “focus on government relations and work with regulatory bodies to develop and implement best practices and policies to support compliant operations.”

This is what Binance said back then about the background of Baker-Taylor, who was “awarded the Blockchain Leader award in 2019 by Women In Tech”:

“Teana joins Binance with more than 20 years of experience in commercial strategy, regulatory and governance advocacy, marketing, and communications within the digital assets and financial services sector, including Coinfloor, HSBC, Citi, Fiserv and Royal Bank of Scotland. 

“Prior to Binance, Teana served as the Executive Director of Global Digital Finance, an industry body fostering global policy and governance for blockchain and digital assets with policymakers, regulators, and industry participants.

“In her previous role at HSBC as the Global Head of Client Strategy, she was responsible for driving strategic growth across its Global Banking and Markets and Commercial Banking propositions.”

On Monday (June 15), Binance UK announced that it would be a holding a virtual meetup at 13:00 BST (or 12:00 UTC) on June 17:

The biggest challenge for any digital asset exchange that wants to launch in the UK is to find a UK-based banking partner, which is not too easy given how nervous banks are about giving accounts to crypto businesses.

For example, consider what happened to Coinbase, which first launched its services in the UK on 28 April 2015.

According to a report by Bloomberg, in July 2019, Coinbase stopped being able to offer near real-time GBP transfer for its UK customers due to a break-up with its banking partner, Barclays PLC, and it was only three months later, after it formed a banking relationship with ClearBank (which became a direct participant of Faster Payments in March 2017), that it was able to resume this service.

However, since Binance seems to have confirmed to Reuters that it is launching a UK platform this summer, it is safe to assume that it already has found a UK banking partner.

Featured Image Courtesy of Binance