Related Articles
A larger push to integrate digital assets into the bank’s traditional financial infrastructure will see Citigroup (C) take up institutional bitcoin custody later this year.
Speaking at the World Strategy Forum on Thursday, Nisha Surendran, who runs Citi’s digital asset custody product buildout, said the initiative was an attempt to “make bitcoin bankable”. ” , ‘I’m sure it is worth reading.
It starts from institutional-grade key management and wallet infrastructure. And that ambition, Surendran said, is more general “to bring bitcoin into the same custody, reporting and control frameworks clients already use for traditional assets” (along with reports and controls), Surrin said.
The World Strategy 2026 forum was announcing these plans, Surendran said ‘We will be offering our clients one service model across crypto, securities and money. She said bitcoin jobs would “be merged into the same reporting channels and tax workflows as equities and bonds” will be in Bitcoin.
She added that clients will be able to instruct transactions through SWIFT, APIs or user interfaces. All they should care about is that they teach us from a client point of view. We deal with all the clearing and settlement complexity, then we report back. – ’.
Client demand
One of the reasons Citi is moving towards bankable bitcoin is because of client demand.
Surendran said Citi has asked its clients, adding that they ‘don’t want to deal with wallets and keys or one-time addresses. They want bitcoin in familiar banking systems instead of –. In addition, Surendran said Citi wants its customers to be able to cross-margin crypto and traditional assets.
A future account structure, she said, was characterized by multiple asset types being placed under one master safekeeping or custody (including U.S. S S. Bitcoin and treasuries, foreign bonds, tokenized money market funds (and even bitcoin) are all examples of Treasureies.
She said ‘It is easier to use these assets for cross-margining because all of them are available in the same account structure, such as using crypto assets at traditional exchanges or broker-dealers and vice versa. But Citi plans to build infrastructure to support that, she said, adding that Citi will “build infrastructure” in order to help.
No wonder banking giants are stepping up into the digital asset space even further. The sector has been subject to a number of years of exposure from traditional financial institutions by institutional investors seeking access to the sector. Since the introduction of BlackRock offering exchange-traded money for increased exposure to more investors, it has now spread to many banks and financial institutions that remain integrating their legacy banking services in its digital assets business sector.
Morgan Stanley, which manages roughly $8 trillion in assets, has recently filed for bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana exchange-traded products and is exploring wallet technology across its wealth platform. Also, it is implementing spot crypto trading on the E*TRADE platform and reviewing lending and yield opportunities related to digital assets.
We need to internally construct this,’ . So, we can’t just rent the technology.’ The banking giant has recently appointed chief executive of digital assets Amy Golenberg at the Strategy World event in a presentation before Surendran is on track to deliver an announcement ahead of its launch by her next big investor ‘I am planning for this year and I have been thinking about it all over my head of online products that will be going into effect today with me now as well as being charged?
Building for a 24/7 market
Citi has also started with private permissioned blockchains and its connection to over 220 payment and settlement networks worldwide, but it is now expanding to public networks as regulations became clearer and client demand grew. something like JPMorgan, another banking giant, has done with its Jpm Coin.
Citi Token Services for cash is one of the live use cases, a 24/7 blockchain-based network used to transfer money within Citi’s global system. Now that we are in the world of 24/7 assets like bitcoin, we really need 24 U.S.” S, meanwhile. But she said ‘It is Citi’s internal systems being adapted for round-the-clock support, dollars or 24/7 digital money.
The 24/7 market is also a niche that institutional clients have been asking legacy financial institutions for. Last month, the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) said it will launch an “ad-hoc, blockchain-based trading venue” for tokenized stocks and exchange-traded funds later this year.
NYSE is the largest U.S. competitor of NASDAQ’s leading competitors, ? s S In December, Nasdaq said it was aiming to facilitate “close-the-clock” trading for stocks and exchange-traded products (ETPs), in an attempt to match the increasingly global nature of financial markets and investor behive.
Thanks for reading Citi and Morgan Stanley expand bitcoin and crypto custody trading and tokenization efforts
