Citigroup plans to launch institutional bitcoin custody later this year, part of a broader push to integrate digital assets into the bank’s traditional financial infrastructure. The bank aims to let clients manage bitcoin alongside securities and cash under a single safekeeping account, enabling cross-margining between digital and traditional assets. “We will be offering our clients a single service model across crypto, securities and money,” said Surendran, who heads Citi’s digital asset custody product buildout, describing the initiative in a speech at the World Strategy Forum.
Bitcoin positions, she said, will flow into the same reporting channels and tax workflows as equities and bonds. Clients will be able to instruct transactions via SWIFT, APIs or user interfaces, she added. “From a client perspective, all they should care about is that they instruct us. We handle all the clearing and settlement complexity, and then we report back.” One reason Citi is moving towards bankable bitcoin is client demand.
Citi has surveyed its clients, Surendran said, adding that they “don’t want to handle wallets and keys and one-time addresses.” Instead, they want exposure to bitcoin within familiar banking systems. Citi also wants to enable its clients to cross-margin crypto and traditional assets, Surendran said. The fact that all of these assets are accessible within the same account structure makes it easier to use them for cross-margining, she said, including the possibility of using crypto assets at traditional exchanges or broker-dealers, and vice versa.
Citi intends to build infrastructure to support that, she said. It’s not surprising that banking giants are pushing further into the digital asset space. Morgan Stanley, which oversees roughly $8 trillion in assets, has recently filed for bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana exchange-traded products and is exploring wallet technology across its wealth platform. It is also rolling out spot crypto trading on the EnullTRADE platform and evaluating lending and yield opportunities tied to digital assets. “We need to build this internally. We can’t just rent the technology,” the banking giant’s recently appointed head of digital assets, Amy Golenberg, said at the Strategy World event in a presentation prior to Surendran.
One live 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 U.S. dollars or 24/7 digital money,” she said, adding that Citi’s internal systems are being adapted for round-the-clock support. Citi, which connects to more than 220 payment and settlement networks globally, has also begun with private permissioned blockchains before expanding to public networks as regulations became clearer and client demand increased.
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