With a vision to provide another avenue of investments to its clients, Singapore government-owned South East Asia’s largest bank, DBS will be launching crypto trading for all its retail investors.
Investment in crypto has been growing at a very high pace and many of the banks are mulling to enter the crypto space with some of the other services.
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With crypto investment attracting huge eyeballs, banks and financial institutions don’t want to miss this opportunity, and taking this very seriously, DBS will be offering crypto trading service from this year.
This was revealed by CEO Piyush Gupta during the bank’s fourth-quarter earnings call recently.
Speaking on this, Gupta said, in the first few quarters, banks will focus on how to make access to digital assets.
Despite this, Gupta did not elaborate on which digital assets they will be offering clients and whether they will also be offering NFTs as part of this service.
Adding further, Gupta said, the service will be different from what we offer for crypto, as we are looking to make it all online, a self-service that works instantly.
We are working on making the internal process so robust that clients dealing in crypto will not have to face any issue while trading with us, Gupta adds.
This comes after the bank’s brokerage arm has secured approval from the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to provide crypto services.
DBS is not the only company that will offer crypto trading services. Companies like Webull, Coinbase, Robinhood Markets, eToro, others have been offering crypto trading along with share trading to their clients for a few years now.
However, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has warned investors that there is a huge risk in getting interest paid on crypto-asset deposits.
While making this statement, SEC said that it has charged a crypto lending platform as they failed to register their crypto lending product. The lending platform, however, settled the dispute with SEC and 32 states regulators by paying a $100 million fine.
Underlining this SEC said that it is safe to have an interest-paying account in the bank, rather than having it in some crypto lending platform, which is not safe.
SEC also said that all deposits in banks are insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and National Credit Union Administration, whereas, there is no insurance for any investment in crypto lending platforms.
Even the US-registered brokers that offer services to clients are insured by the Securities Investor Protection Corporation.
If DBS launches a crypto trading service, it will be the first such service by any bank in South East Asia.
However, it is still not clear whether this service will be available in all the Southeast Asian nations where DBS has its presence or only in Singapore.
India is one such country that has over 15 million crypto traders, but, the policy on crypto is yet not clear.
Though India has imposed 30% tax on profit and 1% TDS on all crypto transactions, experts believe that the government has yet to make crypto legal.
DBS already had its crypto exchange working since December 2020 and launched a trusted service for cryptocurrency in May 2021, along with the launch of its first security token offering.
