A Swiss bank is planning to offer asset tokenization services later this year after partnering with TokenSoft’s new European distributor.
SEBA Bank AG, a regulated and licensed crypto-first bank in Switzerland started by former UBS employees, is partnering with Tokensoft International AG to offer a bespoke tokenization process for entities looking to issue their own security tokens. Essentially, SEBA will design and issue a token to the specific needs of an institution or individual, and manage the token once it’s live.
Matthew Alexander, head of asset tokenization at SEBA, told CoinDesk the bank offers custody and storage solutions, and is looking to build trading liquidity for digital assets as part of a broader goal between bridging the traditional and new financial ecosystems. Its first move is to work with Tokensoft International, a customer of the U.S.-based TokenSoft Inc. that is acting as the distributor for the latter’s technology.
SEBA launched in November after raising over $100 million in 2018, offering clients both fiat storage and crypto custody services, as well as other financial services.
“The bank was established really to become a bridge between the fiat banks and the digital economy and digital banking so our perspective [is] that really what could be missing globally is an enterprise-grade regulated safe storage and custody [service],” Alexander said.
This service is easily scalable, said Mason Borda, TokenSoft’s CEO (Borda is not a director or board member for the European entity). The software stack is capable of handling north of 30,000 investors over a few days, which should enable it to handle SEBA’s integration.
“The custody integration is designed to be done in a scalable way,” he said. “There’s not really many throughput limitations, and so as new customers come in this technology should be able to scale up … it’s designed to handle a large number of issuers and investors.”
Eva Oberholzer, SEBA’s marketing and communications chief, told CoinDesk there is still a lot of insecurity and knowledge gaps around the crypto space.
“We can also create products, structured products or investment products that you actually already know but they’re now focused on the cryptocurrency industry, So we allow them to get familiar with this entire template of cryptocurrencies in the hope that they also get familiar with the entire topic of tokenization and digital assets, and we believe that’s going to become the future,” she said.
Transition phase
SEBA is hoping to help facilitate a transition from the traditional finance and banking system to a more digital ideal, Oberholzer said. To that end, the bank believes that serving a widespread enterprise need “is crucial.”
Scalability, then, is one concern the companies wanted to focus on.
“SEBA has very scalable systems,” Borda said. “Obviously, they’re built like traditional banking systems [but] the blockchain technologies are integrated with that and is designed to be able to handle the load that will come in.”
At the moment, SEBA and Tokensoft are planning to launch the service by the end of the year, and initially will only serve Switzerland and a handful of other European markets. Next year, the bank hopes to expand services to the middle East and Asia, Alexander said, though this is dependent on regulatory approvals and licensing.
The service is almost ready to be launched, he said.
“I think it’s it’s really just finalizing those last few weeks, the tests on some parts of the of the platform itself and then we already of course have been working in various [jurisdictions] where this could be immediately deployed,” he said. “So I think it’s just a matter of us, you know, pushing forward to to find solutions for the the overall tokenization product or service that we’re working on with counterparts and I think by by the end of this year, we’ll see this really working in action.”