BBVA, Spain’s second-largest bank, with around $ 840 billion in assets, seems ready and well-prepared to enter the cryptocurrency trading and custody space and environment, according to two people familiar with the plans. Coindesk medium reported this piece of news.
The Spanish bank expects to start its crypto offering outside of Switzerland, a source said. Switzerland possesses relatively comprehensive rules on digital assets; they established these policies thanks to the country’s Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA).
The consulted sources added to the medium that: “There are still some compliance obstacles, so this will not be in December, but I hope that BBVA will be active next month”.
When asked if BBVA was building its solution primarily to deal with tokenized securities and the like, the source said: “This is a cryptocurrency offering.”
But as such, no authorized BBVA spokesperson wanted to comment or confirm the statements of these sources at the moment of this writing.
BBVA is rumored to have integrated the same custody solution for digital assets, called SILO, as Russia’s Gazprombank. Gazprombank is now available with a cryptocurrency trading offer in Switzerland.
It is also worth noting that about six months ago, BBVA began working on the integration of the SILO custody platform, built by central banking software provider Avaloq and Swiss crypto specialists METACO, according to the source. Also, METACO is currently working on an institutional custody solution with London-based Standard Chartered.
Avaloq and METACO declined to comment.
A second source said that the project will likely go live “around Christmas,” but this source also added that there are still regulatory issues that need better improvement. “The project has to go through several processes to get the green light and become a reality,” said the unauthorized source.
But the news is not surprising. It is worth remembering that BBVA is no stranger to the crypto world as they have been one of the financial institutions that have tested uses of Blockchain and are very aware of how the crypto world works.
This bank made a pioneering transfer with Ripple between Spain and Mexico in 2017. At that time, The Bank stated that such transfer took about two seconds when a transference between two countries like this one usually takes about cuatro days or more.
In 2018, BBVA issued a loan of USD 91 million using two types of Blockchain. Also, that same year, it issued a syndicated loan of USD 150 million thanks to the use of the Ethereum Blockchain. It was also one of the Spanish banks to join the Association for Blockchain applications of the European Union.
By: Jenson Nuñez.
