Westpac Sets an A$10,000 Monthly Cap on Crypto Exchange Payments

From 1 December a Westpac customer in Australia will be able to send A$10,000 to crypto exchanges in a calendar month, and no more. The bank counts the limit cumulatively across a customer's eligible accounts and cards, says it will grant no exemptions and will not raise the ceiling on request, and will stop supporting payments to identified exchanges at its branches from the same date. Money moving the other way, out of an exchange and into a Westpac account, is untouched. The bank has not published which exchanges it counts.

The policy is softer than the headlines

Westpac's own wording, quoted by Unchained from the bank's website, sets the limit and hedges it in the same sentence.

Westpac "may limit payments we reasonably identify as being made to cryptocurrency exchanges to a $10,000 cumulative monthly limit," the policy page said.

Two words there do the work. "May" leaves the bank discretion, and "reasonably identify" ties enforcement to whether a payment is recognised as going to an exchange at the moment it is made. CryptoSlate read the same page as an acknowledgement that payments above A$10,000 may still go through. Unchained and the English edition of Coin-Turk both carry the line that an over-cap payment may be rejected until the next calendar month begins. The headlines say the bank caps. Its policy says it may.

Where the 46% comes from

The figure sitting behind the measure is not Westpac's own. Crypto was involved in 46% of reported scam losses in Australia over the previous year, on the National Anti-Scam Centre's Targeting Scams Report 2025, published in March. Unchained and Coin-Turk carry that statistic; CryptoSlate and Hokanews, both writing on 31 October, do not mention it. Coin-Turk also quotes the bank saying criminals increasingly steer victims towards crypto because the funds are hard to recover once sent, a line no other account read here reproduces, and it stands unverified at this desk. Westpac has been at this before, trialling blocks on some crypto payments in May 2023. Commonwealth Bank of Australia announced a monthly limit of the same size in 2023.

No rule made the bank do this

None of the four accounts read here names a law, a regulation or a regulator direction behind the limit. CryptoSlate attributes it to Westpac's own payment policy. That is what separates it from the Australian measures that did come from regulators, such as the register clean-out when AUSTRAC removed 45 crypto and remittance firms, or the capital floor in ASIC's A$14 million proposal for self-custodying platforms. A bank setting its own ceiling runs no consultation period and publishes no response paper. It also offers no appeal, and Westpac has said as much.

What the cap leaves open

Joint account holders each get a separate A$10,000, so two people banking together have twice the headroom of one. The channels listed are online banking, the Westpac App, credit cards and debit cards, and the bank adds that the covered products may vary from time to time. Limits the exchanges themselves impose are separate and still apply. Unchained published first, on 29 October, and gives the start date as 1 December without stating a year; the three accounts that followed put it in 2026, and nothing read here contradicts them. Whether the other large Australian banks match the ceiling is not something any of them has said this week. No exchange has published how much of its Australian inflow arrives from Westpac accounts, so the size of what is being capped is unknown. The number that would show the limit biting is Australian dollar deposit volume at the exchanges in December, and that is five weeks out.