Absa has become the first bank on the continent to offer digital-asset custody as it seeks to tap a market estimated at about R25 billion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Johannesburg-headquartered lender will offer its South African asset institutional clients \u2014 which include asset managers, non-bank financial institutions and corporates \u2014 with secure safekeeping, administration and transfer services for digital assets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe expect to extend this to other client segments in South Africa in due course, and are actively working on bringing the solution to some of our other African presence countries in line with regulatory approvals required,\u201d said Rob Downes, head of digital assets at Absa\u2019s corporate and investment banking unit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The bank received approval from South African regulators for the service that currently supports Bitcoin, XRP Ledger, Ethereum and USDC. Absa wants to expand to support other assets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cBitcoin is the predominant asset in custody,\u201d Downes said. The lender is working with clients to support \u201cother crypto assets they would like to be custodied in South Africa.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The South African Reserve Bank estimates that crypto assets under custody at the nation\u2019s three biggest licensed service providers \u2014 Luno, VALR and Ovex \u2014 more than doubled to R25.3 billion by the end of 2024 from less than R10 billion at the start of 2023.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The worldwide custody market is valued at roughly R15.9 trillion by 2026, and is projected to grow to as much as R73 trillion by 2033.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Absa has become the first African bank to offer digital-asset custody.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":59,"featured_media":856688,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"failed","_sma_x_autopost_error":"Instagram publishing failed: Instagram returned HTTP 400: Media ID is not available","_sma_x_post_id":"2105967360771297370","_sma_facebook_post_id":"191437357620492_2223952701758462","_sma_instagram_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":1,"footnotes":""},"categories":[961],"tags":[1782,5537,12218],"class_list":["post-878003","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-banking","tag-absa-asset-management","tag-bitcoin","tag-luno"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/878003","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/59"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=878003"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/878003\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":878005,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/878003\/revisions\/878005"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/856688"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=878003"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=878003"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=878003"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}