In modern Britain, you cannot pay rent, receive a salary, or buy anything online or in person on most high streets — as most shops are now cashless — without a bank account. That gives a handful of high street institutions something close to a veto over everyday economic life. Increasingly, they are using it.
In a single year, the UK's largest banks closed more than 140,000 business accounts. The figures, published by Parliament's Treasury Committee, were drawn from Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds, NatWest, Santander, TSB, Metro and Handelsbanken. Reasons given ranged from "risk appetite" to "financial crime concerns" to, in many cases, nothing at all.
The pattern reaches further than closures. Millions of routine transactions — salary deposits, family transfers, HMRC rebates, ordinary online purchases — are flagged and frozen weekly, with customers required to produce documentation to explain themselves before their own money is released.
Access to the financial system can be revoked without warning, without explanation, and with no meaningful right of appeal — only a complaints process so slow and procedurally heavy that most customers abandon it before resolution.
The fallout is felt long before any complaint is decided. Direct debits bounce. Rent cheques fail. Suppliers go unpaid while a salary sits frozen pending review. By the time a customer reaches the Financial Ombudsman, the immediate damage — missed rent, lost contract, ruined credit file — is already done. The procedural remedy arrives months after the practical harm.
The consequences are not abstract. For small businesses, it means payroll delayed, suppliers unpaid, and contracts lost while a bank decides whether a perfectly legal invoice is acceptable. For charities and community organisations, a single closure letter can end an operation built over decades.
And for the wider economy, it means trust in the rails on which everything moves — from a corner shop's card terminal to a multinational's payroll — quietly erodes, while productive activity is diverted into proving innocence to one's own bank.
I write from inside this experience. At Boom, the company I founded to provide commerce infrastructure for the two billion adults worldwide who lack bank accounts, our own accounts have been closed three times in the past year — by Lloyds, by Barclays, and by HSBC UK. Reasons given? None. Each letter contained the same boilerplate sentence: that the bank was no longer able to continue offering us banking services. Three institutions. One identical non-explanation.
From 28 April 2026, new rules require banks to give 90 days' notice before closing an account and to provide a written explanation. This is welcome. It is also, on its own, insufficient — because the deeper problem is structural.
Britain's high street banks closed 432 branches in 2025; another 228 are scheduled for 2026. Forty-two parliamentary constituencies — out of 650, home to roughly three million people — now have no bank branch at all. The same institutions are simultaneously withdrawing physical access and tightening the criteria for digital access — leaving older customers, rural communities, and anyone without reliable broadband effectively excluded from the modern economy, while everyone else is funnelled through digital systems that can be locked at the discretion of an algorithm.
The alternatives now exist. Bitcoin has demonstrated that a digital store of value can persist outside any central issuer. Stablecoins — fiat-pegged tokens such as USDT, USDC and bEUR — have become one of the world's fastest-growing payment rails, settling cross-border transactions in seconds without correspondent banks. The UK is preparing its own stablecoin regime; the United States passed the GENIUS Act last summer.
Platforms such as Boom aim to enable bankless commerce, where your funds are self-custodied and fully reserved, backed by the sovereign state itself. Every pound you hold is genuinely yours, sitting one-for-one against a real asset. When you deposit money in a bank, by contrast, the money is no longer yours; you have lent it to the bank. The bank keeps only a small fraction in cash and lends the rest out at interest. If every customer asked for their money back at once, the bank could not return it. Self-custody removes that fragility entirely. Payments settle account-to-account, without cards, without chargeback theatre, without the four per cent the card networks routinely take from merchants.
For the first time in the digital era, an ordinary person can now hold money, send money, and accept money without first persuading a bank to permit it.
That is not the end of banking. It is the end of the banking industry's monopoly on commerce. For anyone who has had an account frozen or closed — or who is simply seeking an alternative to banking — you now have a choice with Boom.
About the writer
Peter Alfred-Adekeye is the founder & CEO of Boom and PhotonAI, which owns Multiven.