After Tesla’s bitcoin bet, Now America’s oldest bank, Bank of New york Mellon to enter the crypto space with custody service.
On Thursday, The Bank of New York Mellon Corp reportedly disclosed it’s plan to launch a new digital custody unit to deal in bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies for its asset management clients later this year.
Roman Regelman, CEO at BNY Mellon’s asset-servicing in an interview with WSJ said, “Digital assets are becoming part of the mainstream.”
Bitcoin to Come to BNY Mellon
Bank of New York Mellon is planning to manage bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies using a platform, which is currently in prototype phase, that will further be used to deal with traditional holdings. BNY has not yet decided to put limitations on the type of cryptocurrencies it’s ready to custody.
Per report, For monitoring the integration and management of cryptocurrency custody into the bank’s process, BNY Mellon have formed a dedicated team of bank personnel which will be led by Mike Demissie.
Demissie said “We are starting with the anchor in this space, which is custody,” .He further added “Then it comes down to what our clients need from us. So that’s not just safekeeping of these assets, they want to leverage them for lending purposes, they want to leverage them for collateral. Then we are also looking at issuing digital assets, like tokenized securities, real assets.”
While BNY mellon is moving forward with it’s plans to join the cryptocurrency race with major market players, the CEO of BNY, Regelman mentioned that the integration of crypto assets into traditional banking framework will take another three to five years.
With the growing adoption of cryptocurrency amid this bull season, exchanges, trading units and custody businesses are in the race to provide white-glove crypto custodian services to satisfy the growing demand of institutional investors. With the latest bet, BNY Mellon is all set to lead the crypto revolution. It is yet to be determined whether Bank’s plans adhere to the official prime broker definition, said custody head, Caroline Butler.
She further added “But I think the fact that we have such a fantastic collateral offering here, we should be leveraging an ability to connect across those product suites for digital assets as an asset class.”
