BBVA Switzerland, a Swiss branch of one of the largest Spanish banks, has announced it will use Ripple-owned tech firm Metaco’s Harmonize platform for its crypto custody operations with institutional investors. 

According to the press release published on Dec. 7, BBVA, which has been providing Bitcoin and Ether custody since 2021, migrated its infrastructure to Harmonize to achieve more agility and security:

“In this environment, transaction validation is more agile and crypto assets are held in custody according to the highest security standards required by regulators.”

Harmonize will let the bank connect to other blockchains, apart from Bitcoin and Ethereum, which means the potential expansion of BBVA’s crypto services, the statement said: 

“​​Trading on Harmonize™ opens the door to BBVA being able to offer new services in the future, such as trading of other cryptoassets in addition to bitcoin and ether, or the ‘tokenization’ of traditional assets.” 

Cointelegraph has contacted Metaco to get additional details, but hasn’t yet received a reply. 

Metaco launched Harmonize, the orchestration layer for digital asset applications, in 2021. Recently, another bank, HSBC, partnered with Metaco to integrate Harmonize with HSBC’s new custody service for digital assets. Metaco’s partnerships among large legacy financial institutions include DZ Bank, Societe Generale and UnionBank. In May 2023, Metaco was acquired by Ripple for $250 million. 

Related: IBM unveils new air-gapped cold storage solution for digital assets

The partnership between BBVA and Metaco began in 2021 when the tech firm helped BBVA Switzerland launch crypto custody and trading services to individual clients. Back then, BBVA became the first tier-1 bank in the eurozone to provide such services.

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