Standard Chartered announced plans on October 8 to offer custody services for selected cryptoassets, stablecoins, and tokenized real-world assets to institutional and accredited investor corporate clients in Singapore, subject to applicable regulatory requirements.
"We aim to launch our custody offering to hold selected crypto, stablecoins and tokenized real world assets by the end of the year," Ying Ying Tan, the bank's global head of digital assets and securities services, told in the statement.
The service extends Standard Chartered's existing digital asset custody footprint across the UAE, Luxembourg, and Hong Kong, positioning Singapore as the next major financial hub in the bank's institutional crypto expansion.
Why Singapore specifically, and what it sits alongside
Patrick Lee, Standard Chartered's CEO for Singapore, ASEAN and South Asia, framed the market as a natural fit given its existing institutional depth.
"Singapore is an important centre for financial innovation, with a strong institutional ecosystem and growing demand for trusted digital asset solutions," Lee said. "Robust infrastructure will be critical to supporting the secure movement, safekeeping, and servicing of tokenised assets at an institutional scale."
Instead of functioning as a stand-alone retail product, the custody offering will complement the Singapore unit's current Financing & Securities Services business. Ole Matthiessen, Standard Chartered's Global Head of Transaction Services & Digital Assets, tied the move to the bank's broader institutional positioning.
"Secure and regulated custody is a critical foundation of the digital asset ecosystem. As a GSIB we provide the trust, security and institutional safeguards needed to support broader market participation and adoption," Matthiessen said.
What demand Standard Chartered says it's actually seeing
Tan pointed to specific asset classes driving institutional interest rather than speaking in general terms.
"As adoption grows, we are seeing institutional use cases and client interest emerge around tokenised funds, ETFs and precious metals, as clients look for more efficient ways to hold, transfer and mobilise assets," Tan told CoinDesk. "Our Singapore launch further strengthens our ability to help clients bridge traditional and digital markets through secure, regulated and bank-grade infrastructure."
That specific mention of tokenized funds, ETFs, and precious metals signals Standard Chartered is positioning this custody service around institutional asset servicing use cases rather than pure crypto speculation. This mirrors a broader pattern across major banks entering digital asset custody in 2026, where the stated client demand consistently centers on tokenized versions of traditional financial instruments, gold, money market funds, government bonds, rather than native crypto assets like Bitcoin or Ethereum as the primary driver. BNY's own custody expansion, which added USDC custody, minting, and later staking, followed a similar trajectory, starting with stablecoin infrastructure before extending into broader digital asset services.
How Zodia Custody fits into the Singapore rollout
Standard Chartered has built its crypto custody business primarily through Zodia Custody, the institutional custodian it founded with Northern Trust in 2020. The bank agreed in May to acquire the remainder of Zodia Custody, bringing the business fully in-house after reportedly weighing, as Bloomberg first reported in April, whether to fold parts of Zodia into its corporate bank division.
Zodia has operated in Singapore since September 2023, when it first began offering institutional crypto asset services in the city-state, later expanding into Hong Kong. In June, Zodia secured a payment institution license in Luxembourg, enabling regulated stablecoin custody and transfer services across the EU. That Luxembourg license is a meaningful regulatory milestone given the EU's MiCA framework, which requires specific authorization for stablecoin-related custody and transfer services, the same framework ESMA has been actively enforcing against non-compliant stablecoin activity in the bloc.
The broader pattern this fits into for Standard Chartered
This custody announcement follows closely on the heels of Standard Chartered's move last month to begin offering institutional spot Bitcoin and Ether trading through its Dubai branch's foreign-exchange platform, making the bank the first global bank and first Global Systemically Important Bank to offer that kind of institutional digital asset trading in the UAE.
Taken together, the Dubai trading launch and this Singapore custody announcement show Standard Chartered building out parallel institutional crypto infrastructure across its highest-priority Asian and Middle Eastern markets within a matter of weeks. That sequencing, trading access in one major hub followed by custody infrastructure in another, suggests a coordinated global rollout strategy rather than isolated regional decisions, consistent with Matthiessen's stated intent to keep "investing in our digital assets capabilities across key financial centres, connecting clients to opportunities through a secure, integrated and globally connected platform."
The bank has not yet disclosed which specific crypto assets, stablecoins, or tokenized products the Singapore custody service will support, nor has it confirmed an exact launch date beyond Tan's stated target of "by the end of the year."
Matvii Diadkov
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