Selling Crypto as a Business: The Bank Is the Hard Part

When a company converts crypto to money, there are two organisations with an opinion: the crypto provider and the company’s bank. The provider is usually straightforward. The bank is where things stop. The clearest way to see how this works is to look at a crypto offramp with published settlement times while reading.

Why banks hesitate

Banks have internal policies about money arriving from crypto businesses. Those policies are rarely published, differ between banks, and sometimes differ between countries within the same banking group.

Branch staff frequently do not know the policy exists. The person who knows is the relationship manager.

The question to ask, and how

In writing, before the first payment. Something close to: does the bank accept inbound transfers from a licensed crypto asset service provider, and does it require advance notice or documentation above any threshold.

A vague question gets a vague answer. That one gets something you can rely on.

What documentation to have ready

Assume the bank will eventually ask for all of it, and prepare it once.

Who the crypto provider is and which regulator licenses them. What your company does that results in holding crypto. Evidence of where the crypto came from: the client invoice if it was a payment, purchase records if you bought it, the contract if it was a settlement. And the provider’s record of the conversion. For anyone selling online rather than buying, a regulated European crypto platform is the equivalent.

Companies that send this with the first payment usually never hear about it again.

Advance notice works

A short email to your bank saying that a payment of roughly a stated amount is expected on a stated date from a stated company removes most of the friction.

Banks rarely stop something they were told about. They frequently stop something that appears without warning.

The name has to match exactly

The most common reason a payment is returned is that the company name registered with the crypto provider does not exactly match the name on the bank account.

Trading names are the usual culprit. The bank account is in the registered legal name. Register that same name, character for character including the legal form, with the provider.

Set it up before you need it

The pattern that works: convert when the crypto arrives, keep the money with the provider, transfer to the bank on a weekly schedule.

That way a delayed transfer never blocks a payment you have to make, because the money was already moving before it was needed.

The pattern that fails: hold the crypto, sell it the day a supplier invoice is due, then discover the transfer takes two business days.

Records for the accountant

Per conversion: what was sold, how much, at what rate, gross amount, fee, net amount, date and time, and which bank account received it.

Some providers produce this as a proper document. Some give you a spreadsheet export you have to interpret. Check which before you open the account, because building the document yourself every month is real ongoing work. For the real numbers rather than examples, the published coverage list publishes them.