The London-headquartered banking giant HSBC is quite familiar with cryptocurrencies, but it prefers to look at them carefully, global head of digital Josh Bottomley told Forbes.
In an interview published by the news outlet on Thursday, Bottomley acknowledged that certain virtual coins could be helpful for particular purposes. At the same time, there is a line between funding new digital projects through digital token sales and using crypto for speculative ends, the HSBC director, previously global head of Google’s display business, explained.
“[T]hat is very different to if it’s pure speculation,” he noted with reference to established virtual currencies like Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH). At the moment, Bottomley said, HSBC is “not interested in that at all.”
The London-based bank’s watchful position regarding digital coins falls in line with the typically skeptical attitude of banking institutions. Although there are some large players in the finance sector like Goldman Sachs (NYSE:GS) and Nasdaq that have expressed willingness to integrate crypto into their services, others have gone as far as to forbid their clients from using their credit cards to purchase digital coins. Prominent examples are Bank of America (NYSE:BAC), Citigroup (NYSE:C) and JP Morgan.
Asked whether HSBC has plans to review its reluctance to touch upon major cryptocurrencies, Bottomley said the bank does not plan to invest in such assets, but that this “might change” over time.
“One of the criteria we use is if an asset class is showing incredible volatility up and down. For the vast majority of our customers, that makes it an inappropriate saving or investment vehicle.”
Notably, while HSBC is crypto-cautious, it has embraced blockchain opportunities. Following a pilot of a blockchain-based trade finance transaction that HSBC and ING carried out in May, the London-based bank will launch a blockchain trade finance platform in September together with 20 other banks including Standard Chartered (LON:STAN).
HSBC is the biggest European bank and seventh-largest in the world with assets totaling over $2.37 billion, as per the latest S&P Global Market Intelligence report.
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