💫🍎Capital markets • NewsBNY Mellon CEO says bank has to be involved in digital assetsJanuary 16, 202
- sunreefsquare
- Jan 23, 2023
- 1 min read
During the Q4 2022 earnings call on Friday, BNY Mellon CEO Robin Vince discussed digital assets. He said that after launching its crypto custody service last October, it continues to be a focus for the bank, more on tokenization and distributed ledger (DLT) rather than crypto. Broad adoption is not envisaged in the next two years, possibly in five years. While it’s not certain that traction will happen, BNY Mellon has to have a presence just in case.
On that latter point, Vince said, “It would be like being the custodian of 50 years ago and sticking with paper and not adopting a computer. That’s not going to be us.”
The final version of the Basel banking rules for crypto-assets was published in late December. BNY Mellon and other banks were concerned about a requirement for crypto custodians to set aside a dollar of capital for every dollar of crypto in custody. The final rules said those capital requirements applied to banks owning the assets, not to custody of digital assets.
Cryptocurrencies have far more traction than the tokenization of conventional assets such as stocks, bonds and real estate. Hence to get up the learning curve and avoid being usurped by startups, banks need to be active in the space.
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