BBVA Switzerland has announced that it expanded its partnership with cryptocurrency custody and blockchain services provider Metaco to solidify its position in the digital asset sector. According to the information detailed in the press release, the bank integrated Metaco’s Harmonize platform, offered through a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model, to grow its private key custody and institutional digital asset offerings.

The partnership between BBVA Switzerland and Metaco aligns with a broader trend among financial institutions acknowledging the importance of secure and compliant infrastructure for managing digital assets. Representatives from BBVA Switzerland underlined the significance of this service, which provides secure trading options for individual clients, as well as institutional ones. Metaco’s officials stated that the move associates BBVA Switzerland with other financial participants, including HSBC and DZ Bank, which also recently established digital asset custody services using Metaco’s technology.

The capabilities of Metaco’s Harmonize platform The Metaco Harmonize platform intends to cater to the expanding requirements for institutional-grade infrastructure to manage a suite of end-to-end digital asset use cases. The company’s product is an orchestration platform for digital assets, including asset-agnostic custody, trading tokenisation, staking, and smart contract management. The platform intends to connect institutions with decentralised finance and Web3 decentralised applications.

The platform comes as an orchestration layer for sub-products that enable institutions and firms to integrate potential future use cases into their infrastructure as they evolve. The suite of sub-products includes Metaco Vaults, Meta Flows and Trades, and Metaco Tokens. Moreover, the Metaco Harmonize platform provides a multi-layer security architecture to decrease the attack surface and vectors of the system, as well as HSM and MPC technologies that intend to remove trade-offs when securing keys. Customers can also fully customise and design their own policies and approval workflows while having the possibility to backup and restore keys and ensure audit trails.

Metaco’s latest developments and partnerships With its operations based in Switzerland, Metaco offers the core infrastructure and knowledge to enable financial and non-financial institutions to securely expand in the digital asset economy. Recently, HSBC Bank partnered with Metaco to develop a digital-asset custody service for institutional clients. The custody service was set to go live in 2024 and was intended to complement HSBC Orion, the bank’s platform for digital asset issuance. Moreover, the service can integrate with an offering for tokenised physical gold.

The bank’s representatives stated at that time that these platforms were envisioned to collectively form a comprehensive digital asset solution for institutional clients. Furthermore, in May 2023, Ripple acquired Metaco to expand its enterprise offering, with the move being in line with the company’s strategy to diversify into custody solutions and provide additional revenue opportunities. Both entities shared a history of collaborating with regulated entities to develop secure enterprise-grade solutions, the acquisition enabling Ripple to expand its enterprise offerings and provide the necessary technology to custody, issue, and settle any type of tokenised asset. .