Over 50 Crypto Firms In the Oversight of U.K. Regulators for Non-Compliance

Cryptocurrency firms based in the U.K. need to stay careful as regulators are stepping up the game. According to the latest report from The Telegraph U.K’s top financial regulator - the Financial Conduit Authority (FCA) - is currently inspecting over 50 crypto-related businesses for unlicensed operations.

The FCA said this while responding to the Freedom of Information request made by the publication. The FCA said that it “suspected” nearly 50 crypto entities offering financial services without the agency’s permission. The number of cryptocurrency-companies under the observation of the FCA has doubled since May 2018.

The latest report comes at a time when the U.K. regulators are working to established a more structured framework for crypto regulations. The U.K regulators recently said that the latest market crash has helped them to ease off the burden for introducing regulatory framework for the country’s rapidly growing FinTech space. 

Gillian Dorner, deputy director for financial services at Britain’s finance ministry, said: “We want to take the time to look at that in a bit more depth and make sure we take a proportionate approach.”

However, there are a few experts monitoring U.K’s crypto space say that the pressure is still not released for the regulators. The huge losses due to the constantly falling market and crypto prices has triggered complaints to the FCA. Moreover, with such a huge market crash, more number of fraud cases are likely to come to limelight. Hence, the regulator shave additional task to ensure transparency and fair play in the market.

Moreover, the regulators have earlier signaled that it will have a strict approach for dealing with crypto-related financial and derivative products.

FCA’s executive director for strategy and competition - Christopher Woorlard said “We’re concerned that retail consumers are being sold complex, volatile and often leveraged derivatives products based on exchange tokens with underlying market integrity issues.”

He further added: “Consumers may buy unsuitable products, face large losses, be exposed to fraud, struggle to access services or be exposed to the failings of providers such as exchanges.”

Undoubtedly this wasn’t received well from other market players calling it as a “blunt instrument approach.”