The company seeks to respond to the demand of investors’ storage services and encrypted trade. Fidelity is one of the five largest financial services providers in the world, holding about 7.2 trillion dollars in client assets.
Fidelity Investments, a US financial services provider, will launch a storage platform that will handle the transactions of digital assets of business customers, the company reported on Monday, October 15.
Tom Jessup, leader of the new division, made the announcement at Bloomberg’s Crypto Institutional event. Some of the clients they hope to attract are institutional investors, such as hedge funds, marketing intermediaries and family offices.
“In our conversations with some institutions, we are told that providers need a reliable platform to interact with digital assets in a meaningful way. These are the needs of a sophisticated level of service and security similar to the experience they have”, said Jessup.
To respond to these requests, Fidelity plans to build a “scalable infrastructure” that takes advantage of the company’s existing experience in building platform stories. The new company will offer “institutional custody”, commercial execution and “customer service”, as it’s indicated in the press release.
Abigail Johnson, Chairperson of Fidelity Investments, said: “Our goal is to achieve native digital assets, such as bitcoin, that are more accessible to investors. We hope to continue investing and experimenting, in the long term, with ways to make this asset class easier for our clients to understand and use.
Some of the cryptocurrencies that guard the platform are Bitcoin and Ethereum. Other cryptocurrencies will be mentioned during the launching of said platform. Fidelity will keep the cryptocurrencies in cold storage, along with the “physical and cybernetic controls of several levels”, as part of their security system.
The chairperson of Fidelity Investments, Abigail Johnson, reaffirmed that the aim of the new platform is “to make native digital assets, such as Bitcoin, more accessible to investors”.
Nowadays, the cryptographic product market is attracting a growing list of traditional financial services giants, including the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and Morgan Stanley. According to international recent news, Billionaire Mike Novogratz’s Crypto Fund is Fidelity’s first custodian client. The investor is also Galaxy’s Digital executive director. This company aims to achieve a similar objective as Fidelity to institutionalize the cryptocurrency market. In the past, Novogratz contributed $302 million to Galaxy Digital to build a full-service merchant banking business in the crypto and blockchain space. Months later, Galaxy Digital was listed on Canada’s stock market, enabling investors to directly invest in the cryptocurrency market. The partnership between Fidelity and Galaxy Digital is expected to lead to clients of the Novogratz-led firm to invest in the cryptocurrency market through Fidelity.
By María Rodríguez
