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Banks offer crypto: Why doesn’t yours?
Journal of Digital Banking,
8
(2),
118-131
(2023)
Abstract
This paper shares the perspective of market practitioners who are enabling regulated digital assets services within an institutional context. The authors represent one of the world’s first banks that has a full, Swiss banking licence and that enables clients to buy, hold and sell cryptocurrencies within a fully regulated set-up. The paper first argues why recent market events indicate a strong demand for regulated digital asset services. More so, these events prove that banks are best positioned to offer them in the close future. This work further explains the unique challenges and opportunities in enabling such an offering within a bank. Finally, the authors highlight a set of product criteria and value drivers that allow for a winning digital asset product offering.
Keywords: digital assets; banking; crypto; crypto banking; digital asset banking
The full article is available to subscribers to the journal.
Author's Biography
Sai Agnikhotram is a Vice President of the Bank-to-Bank Division at Sygnum Bank — the world’s first digital asset (crypto) bank with a full Swiss banking licence. With over ten years of FinTech-specific experience, Sai has worked at a range of start-ups across verticals such as P2P lending, Big Data Scoring, mirror trading and neobanking. Sai further worked in venture capital, where he gained an ecosystem view of the industry and integrated start-ups into existing banks. At Google he expanded the FinTech practice cross-market and worked with the largest FinTechs in Europe, helping them scale their acquisition globally while improving the user experience across various platforms.
Fritz Jost , before joining Sygnum, built up and led the strategic platform partner initiative at Leonteq, a FinTech platform for structured investment products and long-term saving solutions, establishing partnerships with major financial institutions globally. Prior to that, Fritz spent over 20 years in investment banking in New York and London. As Global Head, he was in charge of the build out of SBC Warburg/ UBS’s presence in capital markets and derivatives. He also held various executive positions at UBS UHNW and Family Office Division.
Simon Kühne is an Executive Director and Growth Lead of the Bank-to-Bank Division at Sygnum Bank. He has more than 20 years of experience in financial services (UBS and Leonteq), of which he spent eight years advising banks to offer cryptoassets and structured products. He holds a master’s degree in finance from the Shanghai Advanced Institute of Finance (SAIF) affiliated with Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU). Sygnum enables traditional banks to offer fully regulated digital asset services to the end clients of banks. Its experience in advising, project managing and launching crypto with banks gives it a unique perspective of digital asset banking. In this paper he outlines why banks offer digital assets to their clients and how they do this most effectively by leveraging the experience of the innovators in this space.
