Sygnum Bank is a digital asset-focused financial institution that is based and regulated in Switzerland, supervised by the Swiss Market Financial Authority (FINMA). The company also holds a CMS [Capital Market Services license issued by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS). Both of these jurisdictions have been supportive of regulated digital asset innovation, which has allowed the industry to thrive.
The firm’s mission is to “empower everyone, everywhere, to own crypto with complete trust.” Sygnum provides services such as crypto staking, trading, custody, lending, tokenization, payments, and more. It also offers traditional digital banking services.
Founded in 2017, Sygnum claims to be the first digital asset bank in the world. Earlier this year, Sygnum raised $40 million in a funding round that was said to be oversubscribed. The company has expanded its offerings to other jurisdictions, including Luxembourg and the UAE, where the bank has received regulatory approval.
As the European Union recently approved bespoke crypto regulation (MiCA), Sygnum has announced its pending expansion into the broader European Union market. At the same time, Sygnum revealed it has become profitable – without providing details, reporting more than $4.5 billion in client assets.
CI recently connected with Sygnum Chief Product Officer Thomas Eichenberger to learn more about the growing digital bank. Before joining Syngnum, Eichenberger was a strategy consultant at Boston Consulting Group, where he led projects for financial institutions. His current responsibilities include overseeing digital asset banking, tokenization, NFT, crypto compliance, and the company’s Regtech offering.
Our discussion with Eichenberger is shared below.
Can you share how Sygnum Bank came to be? What was the genesis of the firm?
Thomas Eichenberger: Sygnum is a global digital asset banking group, founded on Swiss and Singapore heritage. We empower professional and institutional investors, banks, corporates, and DLT foundations to invest in digital assets with complete trust. Our team enables this through our institutional-grade security, expert personal service, and portfolio of regulated digital asset banking, asset management, tokenisation, and B2B services.
In Switzerland, Sygnum holds a banking licence and has CMS and Major Payment Institution Licences in Singapore. The group is also regulated in the established global financial hubs of Abu Dhabi and Luxembourg.
We believe that the future has heritage. Our crypto-native team of banking, investment, and digital asset technology professionals is building a trusted gateway between the traditional and digital asset economies that we call Future Finance.
Are most of your customers institutions? Partnerships with other banks? Do you work with many High Net Worth (HNW) individuals?
Thomas Eichenberger: Our customer base is very diverse, encompassing a variety of institutional and professional investors, including (ultra)-high-net-worth individuals, family offices, foundations, fund managers, external asset managers, corporate clients, as well as other banks and financial institutions.
While we do not serve retail clients directly, we partner – with private banks and wealth managers – with retail banks who connect to and leverage our secure, reliable, and fully regulated digital asset banking platform to offer digital asset banking services to their end clients. For instance, through our collaboration with PostFinance, we empower almost a third of the Swiss population to securely buy, hold, and sell digital assets, reinforcing our commitment to empowering everyone, everywhere to own digital assets with complete trust.
Sygnum is expanding beyond Switzerland, including Singapore, the UAE and Luxembourg. What other jurisdictions are you looking at? What other licenses are you seeking?
Thomas Eichenberger: We are actively working to expand our presence in our home markets, Europe and Asia, where we have established our strong footprint from the very beginning with our regulated operations in Switzerland and Singapore. In the next phase, our focus in these regions is on further strengthening our already strong market position. Concretely, we are in the process of pursuing a direct market entry in the EU/EEA through a MiCAR license application in a corresponding jurisdiction and are executing on our plans to establish a local footprint in Hong Kong.
Switzerland has always been fairly receptive to digital asset innovation. What is your opinion on MiCA?
Thomas Eichenberger: The introduction of MiCA represents a significant step forward in creating a clear and harmonized regulatory framework for digital assets across the EU and EEA. This framework not only brings much-needed clarity to the market but also opens the door for regulated institutions to confidently operate within an enormously large and important market globally.
Are you seeing US firms setting up operations in jurisdictions like Switzerland? Singapore?
Thomas Eichenberger: Thanks to Switzerland’s progressive stance when it came to DLT legislation and regulation, Switzerland has historically attracted a lot of entities operating within the DLT industry. Most recently, we have not necessarily noticed any particular further shifts of entities setting up or relocating their operations to Switzerland or Singapore. The most notable shift we have observed recently is the establishment or relocation of entities to the UAE.
What are some of your key services today beyond trading? Can you share future features and services?
Thomas Eichenberger: Sygnum’s key value proposition is that we offer the full suite of regulated digital asset banking products and services for our clients from one single account. The scope of our offering ranges from traditional bank accounts to payment services, custody and staking of digital assets, crypto spot and derivatives trading, traditional securities and FX trading, collateralized lending against crypto assets as well as tokenization and crypto compliance services.
In addition, we provide products and services specifically tailored to the needs of the most sophisticated and professional market participants in the digital asset industry.
One example in this regard is the recent launch of “Sygnum Connect,” our 24/7 instant multi-asset settlement network.
Sygnum Connect facilitates the around-the-clock settlement of fiat, digital assets, and stablecoin transactions for institutional investors, liquidity providers, stablecoin issuers, brokers, and selected exchanges.
In this sense, Sygnum Connect fills the current industry gap for a complete solution that delivers the capital efficiency, on-demand liquidity, and institutional-grade standards the digital asset ecosystem needs for future growth and makes transactions between participants in the global crypto ecosystem faster, cheaper, less risky and more reliable.
