Turkish banking group Garanti BBVA has launched Garanti BBVA Digital Assets as part of its fintech subsidiary. The company is currently beta testing its crypto wallet, which supports bitcoin and ether custody and provides transfer services. Last year BBVA increased its shareholding in the Turkish bank to 86%.
“Our purpose is to bring the age of opportunity to everyone, based on our customers’ real needs,” said M. Çağrı Süzer, Garanti BBVA Digital Assets Chairman. “Given the interest of our customers in digital assets, we took the decision to form a sizeable team that focuses on developing state of the art blockchain technologies.”
He added, “Our research shows that customers significantly value trust in their crypto transactions and especially in its storage.”
The Turkish bank has 12 million digital and 11.6 million mobile customer and says that the digital channel makes up 86% of its total sales.
BBVA’s crypto, blockchain track record
It’s been almost two years since BBVA Switzerland launched New Gen, a digital investment account. While most other bank crypto offerings at that time targeted only high net worth individuals (HNWI), the Swiss bank had no specific wealth requirements – although customers had to deposit the equivalent of $10,000.
In late 2022, BBVA Mexico’s asset management division, the largest asset manager in the country, launched a fintech and web3 fund. It is also available to any type of investor and the assets include NFTs, tokenized real estate and crypto.
Back in 2018, the main Spanish BBVA bank worked on an award winning hybrid bond issuance platform that included both private and public blockchain networks.
In a separate project that used the LACChain network, the Spanish bank was involved in a $10 million blockchian bond issuance by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). In that case BBVA’s role was to tokenize money for settlement and act as digital custodian, digital structurer, and active bookrunner.
BBVA is also involved in Carbonplace, an institutional blockchain settlement structure for carbon credits.
