Digital asset manager NYDIG is joining forces with banking technology provider Moven to offer plugins for banks that want to launch bitcoin products.
The move comes in the wake of several letters from the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency giving banks the green light to custody crypto and the ability to conduct payments and other activities with stablecoins.
“Being able to offer it on our platform for U.S. banks, it’s the right time frankly,” said Moven founder Brett King. “If PayPal and Square can do it, then community banks should be able to do it, too.” Many of Moven’s clients have around $1 billion in total assets, he said, with some operating with up to $10 billion in total assets.
NYDIG is Moven’s second partnership in the U.S., said King. It partnered with banking tech provider Q2 in November of last year.
NYDIG came out of $10 billion Stone Ridge Asset Management in 2017, hired BitLicense architect Benjamin Lawsky and secured $50 million in funding to build out the team. In December, it hired Patrick Sells away from Manhattan-based Quontic Bank to serve as its head of bank solutions. This week, the firm announced it had acquired Digital Assets Data to pad its crypto research and analytics offering.
Moven advertises itself as a turnkey digital banking product that can be deployed in 30 to 60 days. The partnership will allow NYDIG to deploy its bitcoin products to banks quickly, Sells said.
Moven will be taking advantage of NYDIG’s APIs to offer buy, sell and hold services as well as more sophisticated bitcoin products like a money market account that pays interest in bitcoin or a credit card that has a bitcoin rewards component, Sells added.
“What’s important for any new technology is how easy adoption is,” Sells said. “Even though it may be very small bitcoin balances.”
NYDIG charges a fee for custody with storage options that are overseen by consultancy giant EY. In a low-interest-rate environment, Sells said he predicts banks will flock to a new form of earning revenue.
In an online survey of more than 2,000 U.S. consumers shared exclusively with CoinDesk, NYDIG found that 80% of bitcoin holders would move their crypto to a bank if it had secure storage. Of those same holders, 71% would switch their primary bank account if a bank offered bitcoin-related products and 81% would be interested in buying bitcoin through their bank.
NYDIG is aiming to provide a less-risky option for banks that want to offer bitcoin products to their customers, Sells said. Banks that use the digital asset manager’s bank solutions don’t have to touch crypto.
“As a former banker … one of the things I realized is that for catching up to something like peer-to-peer payments, that really came at a cost for my bank,” Sells said. “Today banks have a 0% wallet share in crypto and this is a phenomenal non-interest income opportunity.”
Read the NYDIG survey: