Until now, anyone who wants to offer crypto-finance products to their customers has had to gather many partly unregulated components on the market. The Swiss fintech Crypto Finance now wants to solve this problem.
Crypto Finance has partnered with Apex Group, the Zurich-based fintech announced. Together, the Swiss subsidiary of Deutsche Börse and the Bermuda-based financial services giant wants to offer a platform for building crypto finance products that meet institutional requirements.
The first products from this cooperation are expected to be launched as early as the second quarter of this year.
The Swiss and Apex are thus addressing a problem that banks, asset managers and institutional investors have yet to work on: if they want to build a financial product on digital assets, they must gather the necessary components from several providers. In the crypto space, many players are still unregulated. This complicates the construction and distribution of such products enormously.
Crypto Finance, which is supervised by the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (Finma), and the Apex Group, which employs 11,000 people in 38 countries, now claim to offer the components for building exchange-traded index products (ETPs), certificates (AMCs) or structured products, for example, from a single source.
The Swiss take care of the construction of the products as well as the custody of the underlying digital assets, while Apex covers the entire operational requirements – the group acts, for example, as trustee and paying agent, provides the administration and operates a particular purpose vehicle (SPV) established specifically for product construction in Switzerland.
According to the statement, the offering is aimed at banks, independent asset managers and fund firms, family offices and professional investors. Crypto Finance is reportedly already in talks with several potential clients.
The Swiss fintech’s parent company, Deutsche Börse, could also become more involved in the new crypto infrastructure. With Xetra, Deutsche Börse operates one of the leading European trading venues for ETPs and derivatives of all kinds.