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DBS to expand crypto trading to retail investors in 2022

The Development Bank of Singapore, which is already offering crypto trading services to institutional clients, wants to expand the services to retail investors by the end of this year.

Image by: Wikimedia Commons

Tue, 15 Feb 2022, 15:01 pm UTC

With the increasing popularity of cryptos such as Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH), an increasing number of banks have already started offering crypto services to their clientele. Singapore’s largest lender DBS Bank, The Development Bank of Singapore, which is already offering crypto trading services to institutional clients, wants to expand the services to retail investors by the end of this year.

“We’ve started doing the work on seeing how we get in a sensible way, take it out and expand it beyond the current investor base,” DBS Bank CEO Piyush Gupta revealed during the Q4 2021 earnings call on Monday, according to Cointelegraph. “And that includes making sure we appropriate thinking about things like potential fraud and others.”

However, the bank won’t be able to provide support for retail crypto trading before the completion of this work, which means that the service’s rollout to retail investors would likely happen by the end of the year. “I think you’re looking more like the end of the year before we can actually take something to market,” Gupta added.

For the first half of the year, the bank plans “make the access to the digital assets a lot more convenient” for its existing institutional clients. At the moment, users need to call a banker to place an order for crypto but the bank plans to improve this by making it online and self-service, according to Coindesk.

“What happens is that you’ve got 24/7, but the customers still need to call and speak to bankers,” Gupta explained. “So the first order is to make it all online, make it self-service, make it instant, and make sure the internal processes are robust to be able to support that.”

DBS Digital Exchange (DDEx) CEO Lionel Lim told CoinDesk that the exchange’s full-year trading volume rose to around $819 million (S$1.1 billion). The CEO reported a massive spike in trading volume for the fourth quarter last year at $595.5 million (S$800 million), which was more than double the trading volume for the three prior quarters.

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