Singapore’s largest bank expands crypto trading services for its 100,000 clients

The rapid expansion of the cryptocurrency sector is ushering increasingly more financial institutions into offering crypto-related services and products for their clients, including Singapore’s largest bank DBS.

Indeed, DBS Group Holdings Ltd. has expanded access to crypto trading services for its 100,000 investors that belong to the DBS Treasures section, Bloomberg’s Natalie Ching Mun Choy reported on September 23.

This section of the bank’s operations covers wealthy clients with investable assets of at least $246,000, and the new development will allow them to trade cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Bitcoin Cash (BCH), and XRP, on DBS Digital Exchange.

From now on, these clients will be able to partake in the bank’s crypto trading operations with a minimum investment of $500. Beforehand, this option was only available to institutional and corporate investors, family offices, as well as clients of DBS Private Bank and DBS Treasures Private Clients. 

Crypto trading surges despite circumstances

This development arrives one month after DBS bank’s exchange reported a significant surge in the volume of crypto transactions carried out on its members-only platform for institutional and professional investors, more than quadrupling in June compared to April 2022, despite volatility in the crypto market.

Back in February 2022, the CEO of DBS, Piyush Gupta, outlined the bank’s plans to launch a retail crypto trading desk by the end of the year, devoting the first half of the year to improving access to the digital assets trading desk for its current clients.

In August 2021, the bank got the ‘in principle’ clearance from the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to provide crypto trading services to asset managers and businesses, after which it opened an institutional digital asset trading desk, as Finbold reported.

At the same time, Tharman Shanmugaratnam, Senior Minister and Minister in charge of the MAS, stressed that the watchdog was cautious about cryptocurrencies, reflected in its advice against any retail participation in trading such assets.

Earlier in June, the regulator’s CTO Sopnendu Mohanty related the MAS’s stance to be “brutal and unrelentingly hard” on the crypto sector’s bad actors, in addition to his questioning the value of private crypto assets and announcing a state-backed alternative.