The bank is looking at stablecoins, including issuing its own or joining an industrywide project, and at a tokenized deposit solution that it would develop itself, Bloomberg reported Friday (June 6), citing its interview with Sabih Behzad, Deutsche Bank’s head of digital assets and currencies transformation.
“We can certainly see the momentum of stablecoins along with a regulatory supportive environment, especially in the U.S.,” Behzad said in the report. “Banks have a wide variety of options available to engage in the stablecoin industry — everything from acting as a reserve manager, through to issuing their own stablecoin, either alone or in a consortium.”
Over the last couple of years, Deutsche Bank made an investment in blockchain cross-border payments and settlement company Partior; participated in the Bank of International Settlements’ test of using tokenization in wholesale cross-border payments, Project Agorá; and partnered with blockchain technology firm Taurus on digital asset custody services, per the report.
Deutsche Bank analysts wrote in a report released in May that stablecoins are entering the mainstream.
They wrote that the market cap of stablecoins leaped from $20 billion in 2020 to $246 billion, stablecoins are “fast becoming strategic assets” and U.S. regulation “could cement stablecoin legitimacy in 2025.”
When Deutsche Bank formed its partnership with Taurus in September 2023, it said the collaboration would support the bank’s digital asset services by integrating Taurus’ technology for digital asset custody and tokenization services.
“As the digital asset space is expected to encompass trillions of dollars of assets, it’s bound to be seen as one of the priorities for investors and corporations alike,” Paul Maley, global head of securities services at Deutsche Bank, said at the time in a press release. “As such, custodians must start adapting to support their clients.”
It was reported in May that another bank, Banco Santander SA, was considering offering a stablecoin and providing its digital bank’s retail clients with access to cryptocurrencies.
Santander’s online banking unit, Openbank, applied for licenses to offer these services under the European Union’s Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) regulation.
