The Singapore-based lender, DBS (SGX: D05) is considering expanding its digital asset trading facility to retail customers by the end of this year, the CEO revealed on Monday in an earnings call. Currently, the crypto services of the bank are only limited to institutional clients.
“We are starting the initial work to expand it beyond the current investor base,” the DBS' CEO, Piyush Gupta said. “Lots of work to do with suitability and anti-fraud… we should have something by the end of the year.”
However, details of the retail crypto trading services to be offered by the bank are not known yet.
DBS became one of the first mainstream lenders to adopt digital assets by offering trading services to institutional clients from early 2021. However, it is still a legacy approach as clients need to call the bank to place a crypto trading order.
The bank is initially focused on digitizing its crypto services to make them more accessible in the first half of the ongoing year. In addition, its focus on crypto can be seen as it made its crypto trading desk available around the clock, 24/7. Initially, the services were only available during Singapore banking hours.
Exploding Demand
Meanwhile, demand for DBS’s crypto services has exploded since the launch of its services. In an interview with Coindesk, the CEO of DBS Digital Exchange (DDEx), Lionel Lim revealed that the platform had handled $819 million as the yearly trading volume in 2021, out of which $595.5 million worth of cryptos were traded in the final quarter of the year.
Overall, the bank posted an overall profit of $1.03 billion for the fourth quarter of the year, which is a jump of 37 percent.
In the meantime, DBS made further bets in the decentralization ecosystem and launched blockchain bonds last year. Furthermore, it partnered with JPMorgan for the development of a blockchain -based cross-border payments platform.
