The Swiss founded Sygnum in 2017, one of the first crypto banks with a banking license.
(Photo: Sygnum)
Zurich The Swiss Krytobank Sygnum has raised $ 90 million from investors as part of a Series B financing round. The bank start-up, founded in Zurich in 2017, is valued at around $ 800 million, as the company announced on Tuesday. Sygnum is one of two fintechs in Switzerland that specialize in crypto currencies and have a banking license from the financial supervisory authority Finma.
The financing is led by an investor from Hong Kong. In addition, the management team and employees participated in the financing round, the bank said. With the fresh capital, Sygnum intends, among other things, to expand the Asian business that the bank operates from its Singapore location.
Matthias Imbach, Co-Founder and CEO of Sygnum, says: “This financing round is an important milestone in our global expansion and in our mission to give everyone, everywhere, the opportunity to own digital assets with complete confidence.”
Sygnum offers traditional banking services that are processed in digital currencies. These include, for example, loans in Swiss francs or euros for which crypto currencies are deposited as collateral.
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The institute also stores customer balances in digital currencies and enables wealthy private individuals and professional investors to conduct regulated trading in Bitcoin, Etherum and Co. Sygnum also works with other Swiss banks that otherwise do not offer their customers their own opportunities to invest in crypto currencies.
Swiss banking license creates trust
Peter Wuffli, former head of the major Swiss bank UBS and now a member of the board of directors and investor at Sygnum, said in an interview with Handelsblatt: “We see ourselves as a partner for institutions and wealthy private individuals who want to process crypto transactions securely and in a regulated manner. We act as a bridge between the old and the new financial world. “
Decentralized Finance (DeFi) Glossary
It became clear to the founders early on that the crypto industry would call the regulators on the scene to prevent a gateway for money laundering from emerging. Therefore, Sygnum is regulated like a bank from the start.
Obtaining a banking license from Finma was a very laborious process. But that paid off for the institute. The strict regulation by the Swiss financial supervisory authority creates trust, according to Wuffli: “The banking license is an advantage especially now when we are experiencing massive hype in the market.”
The institute carefully selects which cryptocurrencies can be traded through the bank. “We apply a very high standard of controls to ensure that we only do business with reputable market participants in the crypto industry,” emphasizes Board of Directors Wuffli. The promise of stability made by Swiss banks continues to attract many customers from Asia. Sygnum is now focusing on the crypto millionaires in the region, strengthened by fresh capital.
More: “DeFi will not disappear”: Young banks want to make the crypto world socially acceptable.