Camille Tas Head of Sales BCB Group
It has also set itself ambitious targets. “Our aim is to be a touchpoint in one in three of all transactions linked to cryptocurrency,” says Barratt. Resilience The calibre of banking partners is the first step to a resilient payments system and BCB requires that its banking partners are part of their respective bank deposit insurance schemes – including the European Deposit Insurance Scheme (EDIS), the UK’s Financial Service Compensation Scheme (FSCS) and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) in the US. But resilience is also about having multiple providers to ensure continuity of service in the event that one bank backs out of the market. “My job is to build redundancy into our services in each currency and market," says Barratt. “This is quite a volatile space, and banks’ appetites can change. So, if a bank says, ‘Actually we don’t want to bank crypto services anymore’, we’ve got alternatives and can just plug our clients back into another one of our partners.” A watershed year ahead Stablecoins are widely seen as a key bridge between the digital assets market and traditional banking, delivering the benefits of the blockchain to essentially fiat currency transactions (see our Stablecoin explainer on page 23). Stablecoins’ potential is clear to both digital natives and mainstream finance and, as Barratt says, stablecoin is likely to be one of the buzzwords of 2025. The path ahead however is not entirely clear as the EU’s Markets in Crypto Assets (MiCA) regulation comes into effect over the coming 6-18 months. Tether has said it will not be applying for USDT to be MiCA-compliant, meaning the best-known US dollar stablecoin will not be tradeable by MiCA-authorised operators in Europe. Barratt, however, believes stablecoins will still be a major force on this side of the Atlantic.
Once we are giving a banking partner FX business, they can get to know us, our clients and our trading flows, and they will then consider us for a larger relationship with payment accounts and other services. Camille Tas
The integration of digital and traditional finance will also expand the market of potential clients beyond crypto native companies, Barratt argues, from smaller international businesses to global corporations. “Those big corporates will be thinking about how they can leverage stablecoins for their treasury so we're now looking at these crypto-adjacent clients,” she says. Digital and tradfi - rivals and partners Relationships and partnerships between digital finance and mainstream banks are fast developing but there are complexity and nuance in those relationships too. The potential for mutual gains from partnerships is clear, but at the same time, payment service providers and banks are in competition. For the foreseeable future, however, Barratt sees the benefits of partnership as the dominant factor. “I have really seen a shift in the last year,” says Barratt. “You see a lot of banks that want to go into the digital asset space but may not have the expertise. It is about giving them the ability to access digital assets by leveraging a partnership with an organisation, such as BCB, which has the experience and is doing it safely and with a regulatory-first approach.” ◆
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