I'd be sure it is because, as the article says, the banks are trying to lower their financial risk.
The trouble is, there are now so many laws etc about anti-discrimination I doubt if they can do it a more logical way, which would be to screen people by asking questions outright, nor would the government allow access to the data that would more easily screen people eg travel movements to show if someone had been in a high risk country recently. Nor can they come right out and say-eg people from Nigeria are much higher risk, we don't want to take them on as customers. So they can give no explanation at all to customers.
If you think, for example, of insurance companies, some will refuse insurance if you live in what they consider a high risk area eg subject to flooding.
If you think of even ebay, sellers can block any account from buying without having to give any explanation and quite a few do it to people who have never personally bought from them or given them any trouble. It could be based on that buyer's feedback to others or that buyer's whole country might be blocked and in both those cases, what the seller is in effect saying is they aren't prepared to take the risk.
I'm not saying it is necessarily fair, I can see both sides here. And yes, it probably will happen here too, if it hasn't already.
