Today METACO announced that Germany’s DekaBank has selected METACO Harmonize for its digital asset custody and management. DekaBank describes itself as the securities house for the German savings banks and has around €363 billion of client assets under management, mainly in funds. Not mentioned in the announcement is that DekaBank is also the founder of SWIAT, a DLT tokenization network that last week formed a consortium with Standard Chartered and LBBW. Standard Chartered is also an early investor in METACO.
“Digital assets are a critical part of the future, a radical new way for how assets will be represented, from currencies to real estate,” said Andreas Sack, Product Owner of Digital Assets Custody at DekaBank. “Today we make another important step towards laying the foundation for giving our institutional investors and millions of people in Germany access to this transformational opportunity. METACO is the right partner for DekaBank to create new services that are secure, compliant, and future-proof.”
METACO‘s Harmonize supports both cryptocurrencies and digital securities, an area that is progressing rapidly in Germany because of recent permissive legislation. Other major banks to adopt METACO solutions include Citi, Societe Generale FORGE, BNP Paribas and DBS Bank.
Regarding other activity in Germany, DZ Bank, Germany’s second largest bank is working on a crypto custody solution. Commerzbank applied to BaFin for a crypto custody license last year, and Deutsche Börse is advancing its digital securities platform D7. In the meantime, the EU’s DLT Pilot Regime comes into force in late March 2023.
