Deutsche Bank targets crypto custody launch within weeks

Institutional and corporate clients could soon use Deutsche Bank to hold and transfer Bitcoin and Ether, with the bank expecting to launch its custody service in Germany within weeks, according to Reuters’ report on Deutsche Bank’s launch plans.

The first users will be professional clients who meet the bank’s onboarding and due-diligence requirements, not retail customers.

Deutsche Bank will manage the wallets and private keys for clients, so they would not need to build their own custody infrastructure. The bank’s September announcement says clients will be able to safeguard selected digital assets and transfer them to third parties. It says the initial target group includes companies, asset managers, hedge funds, custodians, brokers and sovereign institutions.

What assets and services will be available first?

Bitcoin and Ether are expected to lead the rollout, with services to move money into and out of mainstream stablecoins planned for a later phase, Reuters reported. Deutsche Bank’s September custody announcement lists Bitcoin, Ether and selected stablecoins or e-money tokens among the assets it plans to support, while saying the range may change with regulatory requirements, client demand and internal approvals.

The bank says its custody setup will use secure key generation, hardware protection, separate warm and cold storage, and multi-person approval for key actions. In practice, clients would still need to complete Deutsche Bank’s onboarding checks and confirm that the assets and service scope meet their own requirements. The bank has not published a price list in the materials reviewed.

Custody protects access to assets; it does not protect their market value. Deutsche Bank says crypto-assets are not covered by a deposit-guarantee scheme comparable to that for eligible bank deposits, and identifies volatility, fraud, cyber incidents and failures by other market participants as risks.

When could clients in Asia get access?

Deutsche Bank plans to expand the custody platform into Asian financial centres next year, Gerald Podobnik, co-head of its Corporate Bank, told Reuters. The bank has not named the markets or set out a timetable for those launches, so regional availability remains a future plan rather than a service clients can sign up for now.

Podobnik said the custody push is part of a broader aim to achieve 8% compound annual growth in corporate banking by 2028. He pointed to the growth of the digital economy, including hundreds of billions of dollars held in stablecoins, and said digital services would complement the bank’s traditional ones.

Source material

• Reuters’ report on Deutsche Bank’s launch plans — live.euronext.com
• September custody announcement — db.com