New banking infrastructure needed to bank 'unbankables'

The growing interest of mainstream businesses in digital assets is a turning point of sorts for this new asset class, signaling a new era of legitimacy for these digital currencies and the blockchain technology they ride.

Turning that interest into adoption at scale requires a "friendly alternative" to traditional banking through a simple, personal, well-informed, regulated service that can bank the crypto "unbankable," BCB Group CEO Oliver von Landsberg-Sadie told Karen Webster in an interview. It's an insight that came to von Landsberg-Sadie and his co-founder the hard way.

BCB Group originally started as a company that brokered the buying and selling of bitcoin on behalf of high-net-worth individuals, families, offices and businesses. While servicing the market, the company noticed that the actual pain points of the crypto industry were settling the sales of bitcoin, rather than the liquidity of the cryptocurrency itself. The simple act of moving money from A to B was extremely difficult, as most correspondent banking networks outright rejected any cryptotainted flows, noted von Landsberg-Sadie.

"The pain point, which we've gone to some depth to solve, is in that banking layer - very simple transaction banking services for what was previously the unbankable [crypto] market," he explained.

What came next was the company's plan to build the durable financial infrastructure for crypto-centric firms. BCB provides the rails to the financial exchange and crypto markets at scale for businesses that strive to build the future of money in the United Kingdom and European Union. Von Landsberg-Sadie said BCB is the leading provider of business accounts and trading services for the digital asset economy.

Von Landsberg-Sadie identified three obstacles to significant adoption of crypto as a currency, not just its use as a speculative asset for trading. The first is lack of understanding on the part of the average consumer who is just beginning to learn the basics of crypto. It will take some time to fill the education gap, said von Landsberg-Sadie. The second is its lack of ubiquity, or places to use it.

"Once that last mile has been penetrated, we'll see a lot more adoption of crypto in the global merchant network," he predicted. "I see a future in which the de-facto currency will be a completely cryptographic one, but we've got another decade or two before we get there."