Singapore’s largest bank plans to grow its crypto and digital assets business despite the crypto bear market, saying it wants to expand its digital exchange and offer services to more than its 300,000 wealthy customers in Asia.
Piyush Gupta, CEO of DBS since 2009, said the crypto market downturn showed that established and regulated financial institutions, rather than just startups, should offer products such as digital asset trading for retail investors.
The bank’s brokerage arm received a cryptocurrency license from the Monetary Authority of Singapore last year, allowing its institutional and wealthy clients to access its DBS Digital Exchange by invitation.
Gupta said the bank has fewer than 1,000 members on the exchange but will soon offer the service to 300,000 of its wealthy customers in Asia, including private banks, accredited investors, other exchanges and funds through its DBS mobile banking app.
The app would make the process less complicated and quicker for customers, as well as allow DBS to offer it to more customers, he said. DBS had total assets of S$686 billion (US$488 billion) as of December 2021.
The former Citibank executive, who has served in senior banking roles in Asia, said DBS had to support Singapore’s push into cutting-edge fintech. “People expect us to pioneer the space and continue to push the boundaries,” he said in an interview with the Financial Times.
The DBS plans, in which state-owned investment group Temasek has a stake of just under 30 percent, come as Singapore grapples with its message about trying to be a crypto hub. The city-state, whose economy relies on financial services and commerce, believes it must innovate to stay relevant.
But this year’s collapse of several high-profile crypto groups, including Singapore-based Three Arrows and Terraform Labs, in addition to falling valuations globally, has raised questions about MAS’s strategy.
In response, MAS managing director Ravi Menon said last week that the regulator would take steps to protect retail investors while reaffirming the city’s digital assets strategy.
Gupta outlined the challenges facing regulators in the country. “On the one hand, we want to be a global crypto hub. On the other hand, we are also very concerned that our national population will burn out on this speculative asset class,” he said.
Gupta said the losses suffered by retail investors in the cryptocurrency crash underscored the importance of more established financial institutions offering digital asset services. The total number of trades on the DBS Digital Exchange has more than doubled from April to the end of June, while the amount of bitcoin bought on the exchange has increased almost fourfold. Similarly, the amount of ether, another popular token, increased 65 percent over the same period.
“We have been judicious about who we have hired. My view is that we can do this for retail investors, but regulators don’t necessarily see it that way,” he said.
About $1 billion had flown out of DBS and into global crypto exchanges run by companies like Genesis and Binance before the bank launched its own exchange, Gupta said. Relying on companies like DBS, which could set up “guardrails” and protections, would lead to “better results,” she added.
“You could also try to create frameworks and processes so that these are reasonably available to everyone instead of having a regulated space and a cowboy space and letting everyone go to the cowboy space.”
Analysts warned that no regulator can protect against market risk. “In truth, cryptocurrencies are very volatile and fundamentally it has to be people who understand the risk,” said Nizam Ismail, founder of Singapore-based Ethikom Consultancy, which advises companies on compliance, adding that many banks had not. .
Hypothetically, DBS could be safer for retail investors who want to trade cryptocurrencies, but it was hard to judge, he added.
“What we really need is some kind of check or driver’s license to guarantee [retail investors] understand the risks. That doesn’t exist,” said Zennon Kapron, director of Kapronasia.,a financial technology research and consulting group. “Whether that comes from banks like DBS is another question.”
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