By
Tolu Ajiboye
April 23rd, 2024
BNY Mellon said that the bank will leverage its in-house technical expertise as well as collaborate with other FinTech industry players to speed up its development of crypto custodial solutions and provide the best services to its clients.
On Thursday, February 11, Bitcoin (BTC) surged all the way to its new all-time high above $48,600 levels. The recent price rally as big players from traditional finance have finally started warming up to Bitcoin. On Thursday, Wall Street giant BNY Mellon announced its new Digital Assets unit that lets its clients hold, transfer, and issue digital assets.
The banking giant said that it will start rolling out these offerings later this year. Mike Demissie, head of Advanced Solutions at BNY Mellon, will be leading the new Digital Assets unit. The announcement from BNY Mellon states that this will be the industry’s first multi-asset digital custody platform. Roman Regelman, CEO of Asset Servicing and Head of Digital at BNY Mellon said:
“BNY Mellon is proud to be the first global bank to announce plans to provide an integrated service for digital assets. Growing client demand for digital assets, maturity of advanced solutions, and improving regulatory clarity present a tremendous opportunity for us to extend our current service offerings to this emerging field. Pending further evaluations and approvals, we expect to begin offering these innovative and industry-shaping capabilities later this year.”
BNY Mellon has promised a secure infrastructure for “transferring, safekeeping, and Issuing digital; assets”. Besides, the banking giant will also employ an open-architecture approach. It will leverage in-house digital expertise along with leading technologies from other fintechs. BNY Mellon has also shown the desire to collaborate with other industry players. This will thus help them accelerate product development and bring the best solutions to their clients.
BNY Is Changing the Future of Custody with Its Digital Asset Initiative
BNY Mellon is one of the formidable players in investment services and custodial management. BNY Mellon says that it will improve crypto custody by leveraging crypto’s own technology aka blockchain. Caroline Butler, head of Custody at BNY Mellon said:
“Enabling the use of digital assets is critical to transforming the future of custody. Building the bridge between the traditional and digital spaces will create a front-to-back ecosystem for innovation. Our digital asset capabilities should help evolve the way the financial industry operates, including custody, collateral management, issuance, investment management and other segments where BNY Mellon is a key service provider.”
A number of big industry players have jumped on the crypto bandwagon recently. After Tesla‘s BTC purchase, things have also escalated quite fast. Twitter and Uber bosses recently said that they are considering Bitcoin investments and payments. Mastercard also announced its plans to allow its merchants to accept crypto payments by the year-end.
Amazon also announced to launch its crypto payments very soon and the list just gets bigger. After BNY Mellon’s announcement, Simon Peters, a crypto asset analyst for the trading platform eToro, said:
“Bitcoin and its peers are, quite simply, going to be part of the mainstream financial universe sooner rather than later. I expect demand to surge and see bitcoin prices hitting at least $70,000 by the end of this year.”
Other news about Bitcoin can be found here.