Fidelity Exec Predicts Crypto Custodians Will White-Label Their Services

Christine Sandler at an American Banker conference in 2018, photo by Marc Hochstein for CoinDesk.

Fidelity Digital Assets envisions a future where custodians work behind the scenes to store cryptocurrency for other firms' clients, like supermarkets putting their brands on third-party products.

"The way we think about it is, you can build your own infrastructure but that's really expensive," Christine Sandler, head of sales and marketing at the unit of Fidelity Investments, said at a Hedge Fund Association conference in New York last week.

"To do it really well, you have to have geographic diversity, a staff that understands the underlying technology," said Sandler, who joined FDAS from crypto exchange Coinbase in March.

"I expect that custodians that do really well at this-whether it's Fidelity or Coinbase-they will act as sub-custodians to other custodians," she said.

To be clear, Sandler was talking hypotheticals and not announcing any new plans for FDAS. The roughly one-year-old business acts as a broker and custodian of bitcoin for institutional investors and is one of the most significant forays to date into the crypto market by an established financial services provider.

This month, Fidelity Digital Assets announced that it would open up a new entity in Europe to serve European institutional investors.

In November, FDAS obtained a trust company charter from the New York Department of Financial Services, allowing it to custody bitcoin for institutional investors in New York.

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