BitcoinPoint becomes UK’s first FCA registered crypto asset firm with ATM cash-out facility
London-based fintech firm BitcoinPoint has secured approval from the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), obtaining a Registered Cryptoasset Firm Licence which will allow it to explore the option for users to ‘cash-out’ from an ATM network of more than 18,000 machines.
BitcoinPoint also claims to provide the ability to open an account in under 30 seconds with ‘know your customer’ (KYC) requirements completed in two minutes. BitcoinPoint can allow instant top-up through Open Banking technologies or standard bank transfers.
Users can also take advantage of a unique ‘cashing out’ feature at an ATM and set up recurring buying orders for a ‘Dollar Cost Averaging’ (DCA) strategy.
BitcoinPoint is a Bitcoin wallet enabling Bitcoin Lightning payments on iOS and also – soon – on Android. Developers are currently working on integrating the Twitter tipping feature.
With the granting of the FCA registration, BitcoinPoint plans to further its innovative solutions related to Bitcoin, according to CEO Benoit Marzouk.
“We are delighted to enter the very exclusive club of registered companies, our compliance team, the IT team and myself have worked very hard to reach the requirements set by the regulator,” he said, before explaining how BitcoinPoint intended to stand out from the crowd.
“Where most crypto exchanges simply care about their transaction volume and are wiling to promote the latest ‘dog coin’ unethically, our vision from the beginning was simple,” he said.
“Democratising the access to Bitcoin, the original and only crypto with a truly decentralised governance and a deterministic and fixed supply. We wanted to make it easy to any non-tech savvy person to purchase Bitcoin at the most competitive rate.
“We had a feature to buy with cash in one click at over 28,000 point of sales that we decided to stop to change our risk profile, but it doesn’t take much more time -three to four clicks- to buy Bitcoin with the app by linking a UK bank account, and the cost is around 0.2% which is very reasonable.”
Marzouk added that users could also set up recurring transfers from their bank accounts which would be automatically converted into Bitcoin to allow a DCA strategy.
“Our short-term goal would be to collaborate with banking partners to integrate our Bitcoin Online Wallet solution into their banking apps to bring value to their clients,” he continued.
“Any corporation with retail customers could potentially integrate our on-ramp and off-ramp solutions -including cash out at ATMs- to offer bitcoin to their customers. We are already in discussion with a major player in the space for an integration early 2022.”