By
Godfrey Benjamin
May 10th, 2024
The EU clients who admire honest trading and compliance with the laws will have one more crypto trading option offered by the almighty Fidelity.
An office representing the Fidelity Investments firm (based in the U.S.) has opened its doors to the Europeans. On December 16, the U.K. based entity started giving hedge funds, family offices, and fund managers across the EU a possibility to buy or sell digital assets.
In an interview for FNL, Michael O’Reilly, COO at Fidelity Digital Assets, have said that the company won’t even have to pass through additional law procedures:
“We’ll make sure that we’re compliant with any UK or any other licenses that are required, but at this point, our understanding is that we do not require any additional licensing to do this in the UK. Both the fintech and crypto communities in London are strong and that’s evident from what we’ve seen from client demand or client requests.”
Fidelity is famous for trading assets on a large scale. It competes with giants like Warren Buffett with his Berkshire Hathaway and Bakkt. The company received approval from the New York State regulators on 20 November 2019. Thus, it has the right to trade with the Wall Street VC circles.
Since they launched the first blockchain incubator in Boston in 2014, Fidelity had been improving its cryptocurrency-related offers.
Former Bankster Will Lead Fidelity Digital Assets Europe
A man who used to work at Barclays as a managing director will lead the development of the product. His name is Chris Tyrer. He was digging out some good clients in London since April 2019, when he joined Fidelity. Even when working at Barclays, Chris was developing the measures of cryptocurrency usage by banks.
The head will focus on customer services and business development. If the clients will be sending too many questions, they might hire additional people as a Support team. Per Fidelity President Tom Jessop, the interest of venture funds in the field is increasing year by year:
“We’re also encouraged by continued corporate and venture investment in market infrastructure companies as well as the entry of traditional exchanges into the digital assets ecosystem. …Since launching Fidelity Digital Assets in the U.S. over a year ago, we’ve seen significant interest and engagement by the institutional community, which show no signs of slowing.”
Fidelity facilitates a special kind of cold storage to maintain the funds. They put cryptocurrencies on a hard drive within a computer that is located in a secured building. There is no connection to the Internet and no way to hack the terminals from the outside. Why they have picked to use hard drives instead of paper wallets? Because the hard drive can be additionally encrypted.