US-based payments giant NCR and digital asset management company NYDIG have teamed up to enable some 24m customers of 650 US banks to buy and sell bitcoin (BTC) through mobile apps supplied by the payments provider, using NYDIG’s custody services.
The latest development could significantly increase the crypto exposure of numerous customers of community banks such as the North Carolina-based First Citizens Bank and credit unions including Bay Federal Credit Union in California, tapping into currently unexplored customer groups who have remained wary of crypto exchanges.
For the participating banks and credit unions, the partnership provides an opportunity to onboard those customers who have been increasingly looking at ways to diversify their asset portfolios with cryptocurrencies.
“We’re firm believers in the benefits of crypto and the strategic application,” Douglas Brown, President of digital banking at NCR, told Forbes. “And that’s true for our banking relationships, as evidenced by NYDIG, and across retailers as well as restaurants and the like.”
Yan Zhao, President of NYDIG, commented that a “lot of these banks have seen that one of the biggest outflows from their depositors is moving money from the bank to exchanges like Coinbase”. That’s part of the reason “banks are so excited to have this capability for themselves and for their consumers,” Zhao said.
Phase one of the partnership will let NCR’s banking clients buy, sell, and trade BTC and other cryptoassets from their mobile application, claims the report, while the assets will be custodied by NYDIG.
Phase two could see NCR eventually custody its own assets.
Brown said that the banks experience what PayPal did – in the months after it enabled its customers to buy and spend bitcoin, it saw a 100% increase in the rate those customers visited the app, increasing the opportunity to sell them other products, said the report.
He added that they “have broader ambition to do a multitude of things with crypto that will extend into our multi-vertical markets, retailers, and restaurants.”
Meanwhile, as reported, last week, NYDIG, and Q2 Holdings, a provider of digital transformation solutions for banking and lending, announced they will collaborate to provide the more than 18.3m registered users on the Q2 platform with the ability to buy, sell and hold BTC. Q2’s digital banking platform currently powers nearly 30% of the top 100 banks in the US.
Based in Atlanta, NCR says it is a software- and services-led enterprise provider for the financial, retail and hospitality industries. Founded in 1884, the company has more than 34,000 employees in 160 countries across the world, providing its solutions to customers in 141 countries.
The company just recently announced that financial institutions of all sizes can enable consumers to buy, sell, and hold bitcoin through their bank accounts via an integration between NYDIG and the provider of payments and financial services technology solutions Fiserv. The two are also working toward implementing additional functionality, including the ability for banks to implement bitcoin-based rewards programs, they said.
NYDIG provides bitcoin technology and financial services solutions to a wide range of institutions, including banks, insurers, corporations, and institutions. The company is a subsidiary of Stone Ridge, an alternative asset manager with assets under management totaling USD 10bn.
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