Citigroup (C) plans to launch institutional custody of bitcoin later this year, as part of a broader push to integrate digital assets into the bank’s traditional financial infrastructure.
Nisha Surendran, who leads development of Citi’s digital asset custody product, described the initiative in a speech at the Global Strategy Forum on Thursday as an effort to “make Bitcoin bankable.”
That starts with institutional-grade key management and wallet infrastructure. But, Surendran said, the ambition is broader: bringing Bitcoin into the same custody, reporting and control frameworks that customers already use for traditional assets.
“We will offer our clients a unique service model that spans cryptocurrencies, securities and money,” said Surendran, who announced these plans during the World Strategy 2026 forum. Bitcoin holdings, he said, will flow into the same reporting channels and tax workflows as stocks and bonds.
Customers will be able to transact through SWIFT, API or user interfaces, it added. “From the client’s perspective, the only thing they should care about is that they educate us. We take care of all the complexity of clearing and settlement, and then we report back.”
Customer demand
One of the reasons Citi is moving toward bankable bitcoins is customer demand.
Citi has surveyed its customers, Surendran said, adding that “they don’t want to deal with one-time wallets, keys and addresses.” Instead, they want exposure to bitcoin within familiar banking systems. Citi also wants to allow its clients to cross-margin on crypto and traditional assets, Surendran said.
It described a future account structure in which multiple types of assets are held under a single custodial or custodian master account, including US Treasuries, foreign bonds, tokenized money market funds and bitcoins.
“The fact that all of these assets can be accessed within the same account structure makes it easier to use them for cross-margining,” he said, including the ability to use crypto assets on traditional exchanges or broker-dealers, and vice versa. Citi intends to build infrastructure to support that, he said.
It is not surprising that banking giants are making further inroads into the digital asset space. Institutional investors have been seeking exposure to the sector from traditional financial institutions for several years. What started with BlackRock offering exchange-traded funds to help more investors gain exposure has now spread to numerous banks and financial institutions, which continue to integrate their legacy financial services into the digital asset sector.
For example, Morgan Stanley, which oversees approximately $8 trillion in assets, recently filed for bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana exchange-traded products and is exploring wallet technology on its wealth platform. It is also implementing spot cryptocurrency trading on the E*TRADE platform and evaluating lending and yield opportunities linked to digital assets.
“We need to build this in-house. We can’t just rent the technology,” Amy Golenberg, the banking giant’s recently appointed head of digital assets, said at the Strategy World event in a pre-presentation to Surendran.
Building for a 24/7 market
Citi, which connects to more than 220 payment and settlement networks globally, also started with private permissioned blockchains before expanding to public networks as regulations became clearer and customer demand increased. Something similar to what another banking giant, JPMorgan, has done with its JPM Coin.
One real use case is Citi Token Services for Cash, a 24/7 blockchain-based network used to move money within Citi’s global system. “As we move into the world of 24/7 assets like bitcoin, we definitely need 24/7 US dollars or 24/7 digital money,” he said, adding that Citi’s internal systems are adapting to provide 24/7 support.
The 24/7 market is also something that institutional clients have been asking from traditional financial institutions. The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) said last month that it plans to introduce a 24-hour blockchain-based trading center for tokenized stocks and exchange-traded funds later this year.
The New York Stock Exchange’s main competitor in the United States, Nasdaq, revealed in December that it planned to facilitate almost 24-hour trading in stocks and exchange-traded products (ETPs), in a bid to adapt to the increasingly global nature of financial markets and investors.
