Blockchain Coinvestors, a blockchain venture fund-of-funds and coinvestment program, this week unveiled its bi-annual Institutional Digital Finance Adoption Report, which tracks digital finance adoption, by service offering, among the world’s 50 largest financial institutions ranked by assets under management (AUM).
The company said, for the first time, that most of the world’s 50 largest financial institutions – managing a total of more than $123 trillion AUM – are already active in digital finance and well advanced with regard to adoption. More than 50% already provide or support digital wallets, custody, and trading. Close behind, 40% already support digital monies, such as CBDCs and stablecoins.
“Don’t listen to what they say; watch what they do,” said Matthew C. Le Merle, CEO and co-founder of Blockchain Coinvestors. “The most important financial institutions in the world made good use of the 2022/2023 crisis in crypto and blockchain to prepare themselves for an inevitable future of digital monies, commodities, and assets.”
In Asia, 100% of major Chinese banks are already live with digital wallets and digital yuan support, while 50% of Japanese banks have live offerings. About 35% of American institutions in the top 50 already support most digital asset services and nearly 70% support digital commodities following the launch of recent US BTC ETFs. In Europe, institutions trail closely behind, with between 10 and 30% of major players supporting at least some of the digital finance activities, depending on the country.
“Having served as CFO of BGI (now Blackrock) and as a board director of public financial institutions for more than 20 years, I was not surprised by the facts once we went out and got them,” said Alison Davis, chair and co-founder of Blockchain Coinvestors. “The inevitability of digital finance and the tremendous consumer benefits it brings are obvious, and the only way for financial institutions to maintain positions of leadership is for them to embrace and deploy new financial innovations, including those enabled by blockchain technology.”
Blockchain Coinvestors relies upon data from sources including Lexis Nexis, S&P Global and WTW to maintain a database of the world’s leading financial institutions.