Arab Bank Switzerland has partnered with a Swiss fintech company to offer its high-net-worth individuals a secure cold storage solution for Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Fintech company Taurus Group SA, which specializes in digital assets, will allow the bank to offer cryptocurrency custodial and brokerage services to its wealthy clients by utilizing the firm’s “Taurus Protect” crypto storage platform.
The year-old fintech company was founded in Geneva by senior executives with a background in banking, asset management, regulatory, and cybersecurity. Taurus offers enterprise-grade market infrastructure solutions for digital assets as well as other financial services to institutional clients.
According to the announcement, Rani Jabban, a member of Arab Bank Switzerland executive committee, says the collaboration is a strategic move for building a banking-grade, compliant, digital assets offering. Says Jabban,
“We have now a fully compliant and scalable infrastructure that we will use to provide institutional-grade digital assets services to our clients in complement to our traditional wealth management, asset management and credit solutions.”
While legacy players and traditional bankers around the world are reluctant to embrace cryptocurrencies due to a lack of regulatory clarity, Arab Bank Switzerland CEO Serge Robin is betting on Bitcoin and crypto as the new face of the global financial industry.
“We firmly believe that blockchain will disrupt the financial industry as we know it and we intend to be amongst the first banks to offer digital asset services to our clients in a secure and regulated environment.”
Arab Bank Switzerland is under the jurisdiction of Swiss banking laws, rules and regulations and is supervised by the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA).
The bank’s leadership states that it prioritizes “an international spread of risk and an emphasis on political and economic stability’ and acts as a trusted partner to “established businesses, wealthy individuals and ambitious entrepreneurs with strong ties in the MENA region.”
The Geneva-based bank bills itself as a bridge between the Arab and Western world and is an independent subsidiary of Arab Bank, which became the first Arab financial institution to establish a presence in Switzerland in 1961.
Based in Jordan, Arab Bank has an estimated $49.2 billion in assets under management and a workforce of over 6,700 employees across a global network of offices in 30 countries located in the Middle East, North Africa, Europe, Asia, Australia and North America.
