Today Swiss digital asset firm Taurus announced a deal with Deutsche Bank to provide the bank with digital asset custody and tokenization technology. Back in February Deutsche Bank was one of the investors in the Taurus $65 million funding. At that time, the bank said it planned to integrate the Taurus solution into its own IT infrastructure.
In June a Deutsche Bank manager said it had applied to BaFin for a digital asset custody license.
Compared to other jurisdictions, Germany has more permissive tokenization legislation, eWpG. While it wasn’t formally announced, Deutsche Bank issued a trial €100,000 digital bond in December 2022, partnering with Cashlink.
“As the digital asset space is expected to encompass trillions of dollars of assets, it’s bound to be seen as one of the priorities for investors and corporations alike. As such, custodians must start adapting to support their clients,” said Paul Maley, Global Head of Securities Services.
Various other divisions of the bank are active in the digital assets sphere. DWS, the asset management arm of the bank, entered the crypto space by partnering with Galaxy Digital. It plans to issue digital asset exchange traded products (ETPs).
And earlier this year, the Singapore arm of Deutsche Bank ran some trials and released a report on using blockchain in asset management, or more specifically fund administration.
Singapore is also home to Partior, the global interbank DLT payments network. Members include JP Morgan, Standard Chartered and DBS Bank and we were told that Deutsche Bank had joined. Four months ago, sources close to the German bank denied it had signed up, saying the bank had not yet committed.
