Bank Syz, a Swiss private bank catering to wealthy clients with $30 billion in assets under management, has launched Syz crypto.
That’s a new service that will allow their clients to both hold and trade crypto in a regulated bank environment.
“With our new digital assets solution, we can offer a consolidated “one-stop shop” access to a broad range of financial instruments to clients. We are hence building a bridge between traditional and decentralised finance,” said Valérie Noël, Head of Trading at Bank Syz.
Taurus, which describes itself as the number one platform for banks, is to manage the custody of assets.
Four cryptos are on offer. Bitcoin and eth, as well as curiously they have picked Chainlink and Polygon.
Polygon is an ethereum sidechain that is significantly expanding in adoption ahead of their plans to launch a zk based second layer.
Chainlink deals with oracles. Called a Jason Parser by some, it’s a decentralized data feed for smart contracts, providing price movements for cryptos among other data types.
“We now offer our clients the convenience of accessing the digital asset world through a regulated custodian with strong investor protection and supervision,” said Charles-Henry Monchau, the Bank Syz CIO. “Syz Crypto also enables our clients to get a holistic view of their traditional and digital assets in their bank reporting.”
Private banks started offering crypto services to their clients in 2018 with a number of such banks now providing this service in Switzerland.
One of the first bank in the world to provide a similar service for ordinary customers is in Brazil.
Itau announced last month they are to offer crypto custody, showing side by side both bitcoin and fiat.
New Fintech entities have also been providing a similar service for some time. There’s Robinhood in US and Revolut in UK.
Revolut is trying to become a full fledged bank to offer loans. For now they do have a physical debit card which you can connect to your crypto balance, and so spend crypto directly.
They too show crypto, fiat and stocks side by side, with this merger of the traditional and the new digital financial system starting in 2020 and now continuing to add new infrastructure.
