European unicorn Bitpanda has acquired London-based FinTech, Trustology, rebranding the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) registered institutional crypto custodian wallet provider to Bitpanda Custody.
Trustology was founded by Alex Batlin, who has previously been recognised by Global Custodian as a member of our 30 to Shape the Future list.
Prior to founding Trustology and serving as its chief executive officer, Batlin was head of emerging business and technology and blockchain lead at BNY Mellon. As part of that role, he was responsible for research and development of emerging technology enabled business strategy, business models, products and services.
Before serving at BNY Mellon, Batlin was the founding head of UBS’s FinTech Innovation Lab as well as UBS’s Crypto 2.0 Pathfinder research programme into blockchain technology and its impact on business models.
In addition, he has held roles at Nomura, JP Morgan and CSC.
The acquisition of Trustology and its rebrand to Bitpanda Custody will allow Bitpanda to provide an institutional-grade crypto custody platform for its customers.
In the initial stages, Bitpanda Custody will take custody of Bitpanda’s existing assets across its retail, institutional and whitelabelling businesses, making Bitpanda Custody one of the largest providers of digital assets custody globally.
“Bitpanda Custody brings us one step closer to building a leading, fully regulated and secure digital investment platform for everyone, new investors and professionals alike,” said Eric Demuth, co-founder and chief executive of Bitpanda.
“We can now provide retail customers with world-class institutional-grade custody security, and institutional clients will benefit from innovative custody solutions in order not to only overcome the challenges they face today, but also thrive in the years to come.”
Alongside Bitpanda’s existing licences in the European Union, Bitpanda Custody will be able to perform custodian services in the United Kingdom. Meanwhile, Bitpanda will be able to expand the range of services it provides to customers and partners.
Bitpanda Custody’s introduction precedes plans to launch a prime brokerage offering under Bitpanda Pro, which will exist alongside the regulated digital asset exchange. Bitpanda Pro will commit to reducing the cost of custody to zero for customers actively trading on the exchange and its upcoming OTC desk.
“Whether you are a service provider using our scalable, white-labelled high-performance wallet automation platform, a DeFi institutional investor using our bespoke integrations to access DApps or breakout features like DeFi Firewall and transaction decoding, or a token issuer looking to remove barriers to purchase. You’ll get wider cryptoasset and jurisdictional support, higher insurance coverage and SOC 2 certification to go along with a competitor-beating pricing model,” said Batlin.