Your Bank Is Asking About Payments From a Crypto Provider. Here Is What to Send

The email from your bank is short and polite. They have noticed transfers between your business account and a crypto company, and they would like to understand them. Supporting documents, please, by the end of the week.

It is easy to read that as trouble. Usually it is routine, and it is almost always answerable, as long as you send the right documents the first time. Here is why banks ask, what they tend to want, and where to find each piece in your CoinGate account.

Want crypto payments your bank can follow line by line? Open a CoinGate account.

Why your bank is asking

Your bank has a legal duty to understand the money moving through your account, and a question like this is that duty at work.

Under Article 13 of the EU’s anti-money laundering directive, banks have to keep monitoring their customers, including “scrutiny of transactions undertaken throughout the course of that relationship” and, “where necessary”, the source of funds. Transfers to or from a crypto company are the kind of thing that can prompt a closer look, especially the first time they appear or when the amounts grow.

We are on the other side of the same rules. As a regulated provider, we had to identify your business before you could accept a single payment. That helps you now, because everything the bank wants to know is already recorded somewhere.

What banks usually ask for

Every bank words it differently, but the questions come down to the same five:

1. Who is the provider, and is it licensed?
2. Whose account is it, and who can operate it?
3. What are these transfers, one by one, with dates and amounts?
4. Where did the money come from?
5. Where did it go next?

Where to find each answer in your CoinGate account

1. Who the provider is

The company behind CoinGate is UAB Decentralized, incorporated in Lithuania. That is the name your bank will look up. It is authorised by the Bank of Lithuania as a crypto-asset service provider under MiCA (authorisation LB002323) and licensed as a payment institution (LB002324) to provide transfer services for electronic money tokens.

Point the bank to the regulators rather than to our website. The Bank of Lithuania’s entry for UAB Decentralized lists both authorisation numbers, and ESMA’s Interim MiCA Register lists the crypto-asset services we are authorised to provide. A compliance officer trusts the regulator’s list more than our homepage, and they are right to. Our guide to checking us yourself shows what they will find.

2. Whose account it is

Your business is the account holder. We onboard the business itself, not only the person who signed up. If the bank asks who can operate it, the user list in your dashboard shows every team member and their role. It is also a good moment to give your accountant a login with the Accountant role, so the next request does not have to go through you.

3. What the transfers are

Start with the account statement. A PDF statement is generated for each month, and you can download a current one at any time. For each currency it shows your balance, the exchange rate and the euro equivalent, as of the end of the month or the moment you download it.

A statement shows balances, though, and banks often want individual lines. For those, use the Ledger Transactions export: filter by date and currency, export, and you get a CSV of every movement on your balance. We cover the filters in our guide to exporting your data.

4. Where the money came from

If the money came from customers paying you in crypto, the Orders export answers this. Each order carries its amount, its date, what the customer paid with and what you were paid in. It shows the money came from sales, which is the answer the bank is really after.

If it came from your own deposits, the ledger export shows each one, and the bank statement on your side shows where it left from.

5. Where it went next

The Withdrawals export lists the money you moved out of your balance, whether it went to your bank account or to a crypto wallet. If you also pay other people from your balance, the Outgoing Payments export covers those, with each beneficiary, the address the money was sent to and the amount.

If you need the same data regularly, the Ledger API gives you the same records without logging in.

When the bank wants something from us

Sometimes exports are not enough, and the bank asks for a confirmation from the provider itself, on its letterhead. If that happens, write to our support team and forward the bank’s request word for word. A precise list gets a precise answer, and anything that needs a signature takes longer than an export, so ask early.

Four habits that make the next request easy

• Download each monthly statement and file it with your bank statements for the same month.
• Answer with the bank’s numbering. If they ask five questions, send five labelled attachments.
• Explain your business in two sentences at the top of your reply: what you sell, and why your customers pay in crypto.
• Tell your bank before the first transfer, if crypto payments are new for your business. A heads-up from you reads very differently from a pattern they spot on their own.

For the bookkeeping side of the same records, our guide to accounting for crypto payments picks up where this one stops.

A question from your bank is a request for documents, and you already have most of them. Name the provider, show the statement, export the lines, and explain where the money came from and where it went. Most of the time, that closes it.

Accepting crypto payments and want records your bank can read? Start with us.