Coinbase became a little more user-friendly for its UK-based users today, as the platform announced that they are incorporating support for the British Pound (GBP). Coinbase UK Chief Executive Zeeshan Feroz said the move represents “progress towards becoming a primary bank account” for its customers.
Certainly, today’s news means trading on the platform will be quicker, easier and cheaper for this important crypto market. The system is in the process of being rolled-out and the new GBP wallets are expected to be available to all UK users later this month.
Prior to this latest development, UK users had to go through a convoluted process to buy or sell crypto on the platform. Typically traders would convert their GBP to and from Euros (EUR) to deposit or withdraw, meaning further costs incurred on top of Coinbase’s already considerable fees. The lack of support for GBP meant, furthermore, that users had to convert to Euros for authentication of bank accounts, often using the Single European Payments Area (SEPA) scheme. These added costs, when taken together, could be seen to form a significant barrier to crypto adoption in the UK.
The need to convert British Pounds to Euros also slowed the process down significantly, and could take a number of days depending on the financial institutions involved. As any trader will know, such delays can be a serious issue in the notoriously volatile crypto markets. The new system, by contrast, allows payments to take place on the UK’s “Faster Payments Service”. FPS has, since its launch in 2008, come to virtually replace the older BACS system and has reduced payment times for the vast majority of inter-bank transfers from three days to just a few seconds.
