Innovation

Mastercard to offer cryptocurrency trading for banks

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October 18, 2022

Mastercard has announced a program to help banks add cryptocurrency trading to their offerings. It will bridge Paxos, a cryptocurrency trading platform, with banks, according to a report by CNBC.

Mastercard and Paxos will manage both regulatory compliance and security for banks, which have typically been big issues for banks. Jorn Lambert, chief digital officer for Mastercard, told CNBC that 60% of consumers would be more comfortable trying out cryptocurrency if banks offered it.

"There's a lot of consumers out there that are really interested in this, and intrigued by crypto, but would feel a lot more confident if those services were offered by their financial institutions," Lambert told the news outlet. "It's a little scary to some people still."

Mastercard will verify transactions and handle anti-money laundering and identify monitoring services. It will begin the service in the first quarter of 2023.

While cryptocurrency has taken dips recently, with bitcoin sitting at $19,602 as of mid October, down from a high of nearly $50,000 at the beginning of 2022, according to Google's market summary, Lambert believes cryptocurrency will remain relevant in the future.

"It would be shortsighted to think that a little bit of a crypto winter heralds the end of it — we don't see that," Lambert told CNBC. "As regulation comes in, there is going to be a higher degree of security available to the crypto platforms and we'll see a lot of the current issues getting resolved in the quarters in the years to come."