DekaBank, the securities services provider of Germany’s Savings Banks Finance Group (Sparkassen-Finanzgruppe), announced last week that it would use METACO’s custody and orchestration platform, Harmonize, to underpin its forthcoming digital assets offerings. This makes it just the latest in a long line of major financial institutions to delve into the crypto space, which has seen institutional interest remain high, despite the incidents exerting downward pressure on token prices in 2022.
DekaBank is one of the largest providers of securities services in Germany, with more than €360 billion in assets under management and over 5.2 million securities accounts. Its digital assets products will offer custody and management through a secure and compliant platform to its institutional and retail clients, as the Andreas Sack, Product Owner Digital Assets Custody explained:
“Digital assets are a critical part of the future, a radical new way for how assets will be represented, from currencies to real estate. Today we make another important step towards laying the foundation for giving our institutional investors and millions of people in Germany access to this transformational opportunity.”
METACO is fast becoming the go-to provider of digital assets services for major global banks and financial institutions, having in the past year signed up big names including France’s Société Générale, Spain’s BBVA, UnionBank of the Philippines, and Citibank in the US. Its Harmonize platform was developed in partnership with Tier 1 banks and enables commercial launch of complex products with institutional-grade security and compliance.
DekaBank’s announcement continues the seemingly unstoppable trend of major institutions expanding into the digital assets custody and management marketplace, largely to service demand from clients. This is not the company’s first dalliance with blockchain, however, as in late 2021 it issued its first crypto-securities on the blockchain in the form of bearer bonds.
As the institutional adoption of digital assets marches inexorably on, it will only be a matter of time before it becomes the exception to find a major bank not offering crypto services to its clients, who will then likely search out another provider if theirs doesn’t fall in line.
Will 2023 be the year that crypto adoption amongst banks and other financial services providers hits critical mass? As ever, we will continue to observe.
