The Puerto Rico Office of the Commissioner of Financial Institutions (OCIF) has granted permission to FV Bank to provide custody services for cryptocurrency assets such as Ethereum and Bitcoin. The institution plans to integrate the new service into its digital banking platform as of early 2021. Based in Puerto Rico, United States, FV Bank is a global digital bank servicing domestic and international businesses focusеed on providing fintech solutions. The Puerto Rican bank announced that it received regulatory approval to offer bitcoin custody.
The bank revealed all custodial accounts would be insured.
Institutional and retail customers of the Puerto Rican bank will be able to open accounts with fiat or digital asset balances to take advantage of crypto assets’ custodial storage and exchange for fiat. The bank’s internal real-time fiat settlement platform called FV Net will also be compatible with the new custodial service. Apart from Bitcoin and Ethereum, the bank did not disclose other cryptocurrency assets that will be available for custody. However, the bank said that it would provide all account holders separate deposit addresses for each digital asset they wish to hold.
Since FV Bank is a digital bank, all retail and institutional bank customers will have access to their cryptocurrency funds through online and mobile banking applications. Additionally, the announcement revealed that all custodial accounts would be insured.
There has been an increased demand for bitcoin custody from the bank’s clients.
The Puerto Rican Bank’s Chief Revenue Officer, Nitin Agarwal, said that the decision to launch a custodial service for cryptocurrencies comes after increased demand from the bank’s clients. He acknowledged the industry’s growth in the past several months but said that their customers expect an “easy and trustworthy way to invest in and securely hold digital assets.” Earlier, the US Treasury Department presented new KYC regulations for crypto users.
