Banking Giant DBS To Offer Retail Crypto Trading Starting Late This Year, According to CEO

The largest bank in Singapore is making a move towards crypto with plans to offer retail trading services for some of the largest crypto assets by market cap.

In a new earnings call, DBS Bank CEO Piyush Gupta says that the banking giant plans to expand its current crypto operations.

DBS first rolled out its crypto exchange for institutional and accredited investors in late 2020, offering trading services for Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), XRP and Bitcoin Cash (BCH).

Gupta says the bank plans on spending the first part of 2022 improving that existing service.

“What we are going to focus on in the first half or the first three quarters of this year is to make the access to the digital assets a lot more convenient, but still in the accredited investor space. Today, what happens is that we’re going 24/7 but our customers still need to call and speak to bankers.

So the first order [of the] day is to make it all online, make it self-service, make it instant, and make sure the internet processes are robust enough to be able to support that.”

The banking executive also notes they want to expand their services to retail investors.

“At the same time, we’ve started doing the work on seeing how we can, in a sensible way, take it out and expand it beyond the accredited investor base, and that includes making sure we have appropriate thinking about… potential for fraud, etc.” 

Gupta estimates that DBS will roll out retail crypto services closer to the end of 2022.

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