Nordea Bank Employees Banned From Crypto Use, Even In Their Own Time

Waking up this morning and looking at all the latest crypto news, I particularly found this one both interesting and strange at the same time. 

Why Nordea Bank’s ban on its 31,500 employees for trading in Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies is definitely a strange one. Not only can they not have anything to do with cryptocurrency during the working day, but even outside of work, employees are banned from touching the digital assets. This was a ruling which was upheld last week by a Danish court.

No Crypto

In a press release posted following the ruling, the Denmark-based firm highlighted that "Employees are permitted to keep any existing holdings,” however, it went onto add that they were urged to sell them off instead.

“The transition period in section 9 of this directive does not apply to existing holdings

in cryptocurrencies. Employees are permitted to keep any existing holdings, but are

encouraged to sell them, and no further investments into cryptocurrencies must be

made unless one of the exceptions mentioned above apply."

A class-action lawsuit was brought against Nordea’s cryptocurrency outlook last year by Finansforbundet. This lawsuit was made on the grounds that the ban was getting involved with the worker’s personal lives, which is strange when you think about it. 

It appears that the bank was seemingly worried at the time that its employees might accidentally get involved with some criminal or unethical activities. 

As a spokesperson for Nordea Bank has said:

“The market for crypto-currencies is unregulated and not transparent. It makes it hard to monitor where the money comes from. It increases the risk that investors, including our employees, may unwillingly get involved in activities that are unethical or outright illegal.”

He added, “We are satisfied that the court ruled in our favour.”

It will be interesting to see how this situation plays out. For more news on this and other crypto updates, keep it with CryptoDaily!