Turkey’s Garanti BBVA launched its Garanti BBVA Digital Assets as part of its fintech subsidiary last year. It went live with its wallet in June, and has now confirmed it is using a combination of technologies from Ripple Custody and IBM. So far it has 14,000 digital asset clients, with the main bank serving 12 million digital and 11.6 million mobile customers.
The Ripple/IBM digital asset custody partnership is unsurprising. BBVA owns around 86% of Garanti BBVA and the group has been an early mover in digital assets. BBVA Switzerland started offering crypto services to retail clients in 2021. The bank partnered with Switzerland’s Metaco for digital asset custody technology, and Ripple acquired Metaco last year.
Additionally, Metaco previously integrated IBM’s hardware security model solution. For example, in 2022 Philippines’ UnionBank adopted the IBM Cloud Hyper Protect Crypto Services, which enables banks to control private keys, in conjunction with Metaco’s offering. The combination provides end-to-end security to protect private keys, applications and data.
As part of the announcement, Garanti BBVA provided an updated on the status of its digital asset offering. “We’ve seen clear demand and growing interest from our customers in digital assets. In order to respond to this demand, we launched our Garanti BBVA Digital Assets company in 2023 and currently provide services for BTC, ETH, USDC, AVAX, CHZ, XRP, ARB, and SOL as Garanti BBVA Kripto,” said Korcan Abalı, CEO of Garanti BBVA Kripto.
“We will continue to scale by increasing our asset diversity and developing our service infrastructure. Our collaboration with Ripple and IBM gives us the confidence of institutional-grade custody infrastructure, which offers safety, robust governance and compliant processes.”
Meanwhile, in another innovative move, BBVA is exploring issuing a stablecoin using the Visa Tokenized Asset Platform (VTAP). While this will make it an early mover, there are already over 20 bank-linked stablecoin initiatives, as outlined in our report on bank stablecoins and tokenized deposits.
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