Taurus Group SA announced that TAURUS PROTECT, its cold storage solution for exchanges, banks and institutional clients, has been successfully deployed with Arab Bank Switzerland. Taurus also assisted the bank prepare operational policies and procedures for the new crypto services. It is another addition to the growing list of establishments who are joining forces with fintech firms to tap the crypto asset market.
Arab Bank Switzerland, a sister company of Middle East-based banking giant Arab Bank, is now offering trading and custody services of Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH), the world’s two largest cryptocurrencies, to its affluent clients. The move means Arab Bank Switzerland’s high net-worth clients, including business leaders and family entrepreneurs, can now get access to digital assets.
For the custody service, the bank has partnered with Taurus Group, which has integrated its cold storage solution with the bank’s infrastructure. Taurus said the solution uses the Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 140-2, level 3 certified hardware security modules (HSMs), “some of the most secure hardware in the world.” Taurus has been collaborating throughout 2019 with Arab Bank Switzerland to integrate TAURUS PROTECT with the Bank’s infrastructure. In addition to technological and security aspects, the Taurus team has also been involved in architecting and implementing, together with Arab Bankexperts, the Bank’s digital assets target operating model, including necessary business, regulatory, risk, and operational policies and procedures.
The Taurus Group Managing Partner, Lamine Brahimi, stated that “supporting innovative players like Arab Bank … is a necessary step to ensure that the next generation of financial market infrastructure is based on blockchain.” Sébastien Dessimoz, co-founder of Taurus Group SA said: “The go-live at Arab Bank Switzerland represents an important milestone for the Geneva financial center. I am very proud of our Taurus team which proved again that we master technology and security, as well as all required financial services and regulatory dimensions needed to build a banking-grade, compliant, digital assets offering.”
In a press release, Serge Robin, the CEO of Arab Bank (Switzerland), stated: “We firmly believe that blockchain will disrupt the financial industry as we know it and we intend to be amongst the first banks to offer digital asset services to our clients in a secure and regulated environment.”
“We have now a fully compliant and scalable infrastructure that we will use to provide institutional-grade digital assets services to our clients in complement to our traditional wealth management, asset management and credit solutions,” said Rani Jabban, a member of the executive committee at Arab Bank Switzerland.
Several other Swiss banks have also launched services for crypto assets: Taurus had already established another partnership with bank Vontobel for their “Digital Asset Vault”, Julius Baer announced a partnership with crypto bank SEBA Crypto AG; Gazprombank Switzerland paired up with the crypto-storage specialist METACO and the fintech company Avaloq; Falcon Private Bank joined hands with Bitcoin Suisse, and digital bank Swissquote is an active service provider too, while Maerki Baumann is on the lookout for fintech partners.
Source: coindesk.com and Taurus press release
