The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), an independent bureau within the US Department of the Treasury that serves to charter, regulate, and supervise all national banks and thrift institutions and the federally licensed branches and agencies of foreign banks in the United States, announced on April 23, 2021, a preliminary conditional approval of the application to charter Paxos National Trust, New York.
The OCC has reportedly granted a national trust bank charter to Paxos after performing an extensive review of the firm and its current business operations. In granting this charter, the OCC confirmed that it has applied the same rigorous review and strict standards applied to all such charter applications. The OCC has granted preliminary conditional approval to Paxos after careful and thorough review of its application.
The federal banking system includes almost 1,200 national banks, federal savings associations, and federal branches of foreign banking organizations that are offering financial services in the US. These institutions may range or vary in size from 1,000 smaller community banks under $10 billion in AUM – which specialize mostly in satisfying local requirements. These institutions also include some of the largest “internationally active” banks.
These banking service providers or companies carry out a wide range of business operations such as retail and wholesale banking activity to trust, credit card and other “narrowly focused” services. The institutions that make up the federal banking system carry out around 70% of the banking activity that takes place in the US. They also hold over $14 trillion in assets combined, and manage over $60 trillion under their custody and fiduciary control.
As reported recently, Crypto on Venmo has launched. PayPal’s peer-to-peer transfer platform will now allow Venmo’s 70+ million users to buy, hold, sell crypto within the app thus morphing Venmo into a crypto wallet.
Crypto on Venmo is powered by PayPal’s relationship with Paxos Trust Company, a regulated provider of cryptocurrency products and services. As covered, Melayna Ingram from Paxos has explained how crypto regulations can “foster innovation.”