Quebecois company Bank of Montreal has started blocking transactions based on cryptocurrency exchange, the Finance Magnates reported. This means that any transactions conducted on any of their debit and credit cards banking on the cryptocurrency platform will be blocked by the bank, according to a Reddit user that provided a screenshot of the bank letter.
The letter did not mention any antagonism towards any cryptocurrencies still functioning on the market. They clarified though that as far as the bank’s parent company, BMO Financial Group, is concerned, cryptocurrency merchant transactions are blocked and will show up on the screen as incomplete transactions, prompting clients to instead pay using other methods that their Mastercard online accounts allow.
For BMO Mastercard clients signing up into the crypto trading platform for the first time, they will be barred from using their cards. In effect, no charges will be posted on these cards in case customers are investing in cryptocurrency. Said cards won’t be applicable either in case customers wanted to upgrade.
The block came across as odd to the bank’s clients as only days ago, a new cryptocurrency brokerage platform is about to be launched by the Toronto Stock Exchange with help from its parent company, the TMX Group. And Bank of Montreal was one of the confirmed financial institutions confirmed to be providing bank-related services to the cryptocurrency exchange endeavor. This gave the impression that while the bank will be catering to the brokerage companies, it cannot accommodate its own customer base investing in cryptocurrency.
Well, not everything. Bank of Montreal made it a point to see any solutions applicable to customers still in the crypto trading platform that their Mastercard is plugged into. The same Reddit screenshot displayed a paragraph specifying transactions conducted through their Interac Online Payment Service.
If customers used the Interac Online Payment for buying tokens or some other manner of investing in cryptocurrency, the card will be charged only temporarily. The moment the wired transaction is sent to the merchant, the block then gets applied with an error message showing up on the customer’s end that the transaction cannot be completed. To get past the fine print, transaction is still blocked and the temporary charge is reversed within half an hour.
Posted from my blog with SteemPress : https://smartereum.com/6768/canadian-bank-block-cryptocurrency-transactions/