One of the largest banks in Germany by total assets, DZ Bank, has launched a crypto custody platform. Additionally, the bank disclosed that alongside its solution for institutional customers, it is working on “an offer that allows private customers to invest directly in cryptocurrencies.”
Germany’s DZ Bank Debuts Digital Custody Platform
DZ Bank, one of the largest banks in Germany, announced the launch of its own digital custody platform last week. “To operate the new custody solution, the bank has hired more than a dozen employees in IT, operations, and compliance,” the announcement detailed (translated by Google). As of the end of June, the bank’s total assets amounted to €367.50 billion ($392.35 billion), and it had a workforce of 5,411 employees.
The bank explained that it had been working with blockchain technology for years before it began developing a digital custody platform for institutional clients in 2022. The announcement described:
This makes the leading cooperative institution one of the first credit institutions to launch such an offer for institutional customers based on blockchain technology.
DZ Bank stated that initially, it will only custody “crypto securities,” noting: “This includes a crypto bond from Siemens, which Union Investment and DZ Bank subscribed to six months ago and which could now be transferred to self-custody.” Siemens announced in February that it had issued a digital bond on a public blockchain with a volume of €60 million and a maturity of one year. The company chose the Polygon blockchain to issue the bond.
“We assume that within the next 10 years, a significant proportion of capital market business will be processed via distributed ledger technology (DLT)-based infrastructures,” commented Holger Meffert, Head of Securities Services and Digital Custody at DZ Bank. “In the medium term, we see DLT as a complementary technology to the established infrastructures in the existing capital market processes.”
DZ Bank previously revealed that it planned to utilize a platform developed by Metaco, a provider of digital asset management technology and infrastructure, in order to provide cryptocurrency services to institutional clients.
The bank further shared that it applied for a crypto custody license from the Federal Financial Supervisory Authority (BaFin) in June “in order to enable institutional customers to invest in cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin,” adding:
In parallel to the solution for institutional customers, the bank is working on an offer that allows private customers to invest directly in cryptocurrencies.
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