Planners reject digital currency fee payments
Financial Planners have said they would not accept payment for fees in digital and crypto currencies, despite UK Treasury regulation plans.
Yesterday the Treasury said it will regulate some ‘stablecoins’.
Stablecoins are designed to have a value linked to traditional currencies of assets such as gold. They are considered less volatile than other cryptocurrencies.
The Treasury has yet to confirm which stablecoins it will regulate.
Financial Planners have said that despite the Treasury regulation announcement, they have no plans to start accepting cryptocurrency for fee payments in the future.
The idea of accepting payment for fees in cryptocurrency is not one that Darren Cooke, Chartered Financial Planner at Red Circle Financial Planning, would consider “in a million years”.
“Right now, if any client suggested it I'd seriously consider if I wanted to continue working with them,” he said.
Scott Gallacher, director at Chartered Financial Planning firm Rowley Turton, said his firm has no plans to consider accepting any cryptocurrency payments any time soon.
He said: "I wouldn't accept payment in stablecoin. Not at all. While regulation might stop some of the outright fraud we've seen in the cryptocurrency world, there are far too many cryptocurrencies, and they are typically still far too volatile to be of any use to me as a method of payment. We're just not there yet."
Rob Lewis, director and IFA at Celtic Financial Planning, said his firm has too many concerns about the ethical considerations of accepting cryptocurrency for fee payments.
He said: “I think one of the biggest challenges we would have with this, aside from the insurance / regulatory issues would be ethical considerations.
“Often cryptocurrencies are used by criminals and illegal activities due to their discrete nature, we wouldn’t have the same information to check where its comes from and to perform sufficient due diligence checks for AML purposes.”