On Monday (15 October 2018), Fidelity Investments, one of the world’s largest financial services providers with more than $7.2 trillion in client assets, announced the launch of a new company, Fidelity Digital Asset Services, which will offer “enterprise-quality custody and trade execution services” for cryptocurrencies to institutional investors (such as “hedge funds, family offices and market intermediaries”). These new services are expected to be available in 2019.

Abigail P. Johnson, Chairman and CEO of Fidelity Investments, had this to say about the new company being launched today:

“Our goal is to make digitally-native assets, such as bitcoin, more accessible to investors. We expect to continue investing and experimenting, over the long-term, with ways to make this emerging asset class easier for our clients to understand and use.”

And Tom Jessop, head of Fidelity Digital Assets, stated:

“We started exploring blockchain and digital assets several years ago, and those efforts have been successful in helping us understand and advance our thinking around cryptocurrencies. The creation of Fidelity Digital Assets is the first step in a long-term vision to create a full-service enterprise-grade platform for digital assets.”

In its press release, Fidelity says that although there are many solutions servicing the needs of retail crypto investors, there is a shortage of institutional-grade solutions. It says that although “Greenwich Associates found that 70 percent of institutional finance executives believe cryptocurrencies will have a place in the future of the industry”, many institutions “are waiting on the sidelines to enter this market.” 

It also says that in the most recent edition of its “Fidelity Global Institutional Investor Survey”, it found that “70 percent of institutional investors said that new asset classes will likely emerge because of advancing technologies, such as blockchain.” Fidelity expects institutional investors (such as hedge funds) think about entering to enter the crypto markets for various reasons, such as “the rising popularity as a store of value or relative non-correlation to the broader market, the potential to power lower-cost global payments, or the emergence of protocols that could power new industries.”

Fidelity Digital Assets plans to offer:

  • Institutional-Grade Custody of Digital Assets. This means: “a secure, compliant, and institutional-grade omnibus storage solution for bitcoin, ether and other digital assets” and consists of “vaulted cold storage, multi-level physical and cyber controls.”
  • Trade Execution. Here, it “will leverage a proven internal crossing engine and smart order router for trade execution of digital assets”; this “smart order router will allow for execution at multiple market venues.”
  • Dedicated Client Service. Clients will have “access to a dedicated team of client service specialists, from onboarding throughout the entire relationship with the company.”

Jessop says:

“In our conversations with institutions, they tell us that in order to engage with digital assets in a meaningful way, they need a trusted platform provider to enter this space. These institutions require a sophisticated level of service and security, equal to the experience they’re used to when trading stocks or bonds. With Fidelity Digital Assets, we’re building a scalable infrastructure for digital assets that meets the expectations of what it means to work with Fidelity, while leveraging unique capabilities of the blockchain to create a completely new offering.”

Hunter Horsely, co-founder and CEO at Bitwise Asset Management, called this announcement “a huge moment for the crypto space”:

 

Featured Image Courtesy of Fidelity Investments