The Swiss branch of Spanish bank BBVA is expanding its cryptocurrency custody and trading services to include USD Coin (USDC).
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BBVA’s institutional and retail banking customers in Switzerland can now manage their USDC funds on the same platform on which they manage their traditional investments. You can exchange USDC in near real time, hold custody or automatically convert it to euros, dollars or any other currency.
The bank says the addition of the stablecoin will enable its institutional customers to accelerate their trading operations by allowing them to transfer value more efficiently using blockchain and secure their stablecoins in BBVA’s vault.
The introduction of USDC not only speeds up transactions, but also provides a way to hedge against the volatility of other cryptocurrencies by converting assets into stablecoins to preserve value during market fluctuations.
USDC is the third cryptocurrency that BBVA has added to its digital asset service in Switzerland after launching in 2021 with Bitcoin and Ether. In 2023, the company migrated its custody function to Metaco’s Harmonize platform, which streamlines transactions and enables connectivity to other blockchain networks.
“We want to provide our retail customers with easy access to the tokenized products they are most interested in and which they cannot access through traditional financial institutions. In the meantime, our institutional clients need to be provided with options to guarantee the assets they manage,” explains Philippe Meyer, Head of Digital Solutions and Blockchain at BBVA in Switzerland. “We will analyze all the crypto assets you invest in to further expand our offering with more innovative solutions.”