CBA to be the first Australian bank to offer crypto services to customers

The mainstream knows it now: the substantial opportunities for growth in cryptocurrency and its capacity to disrupt the financial system. Legacy companies are catching up. Remember PayPal? They want to join the future too. The banks are a little late to the party, but they’re coming too. 

CBA will become Australia’s first bank to offer customers the ability to buy, sell and hold crypto assets through their mobile banking app. They have set themselves a new challenge to make crypto available for everyday customers.

In order to build the infrastructure to make that possible, the major bank has partnered up with two of the most trusted companies in the crypto space: Gemini, a regulated crypto-native exchange and custodian – and Chainalysis, a leading blockchain analysis firm.

Gemini’s APIs will be incorporated into the CommBank app to provide a simple, elegant and secure feature that enables its customers to buy, sell and hold crypto. 

Chainalysis, on the other hand, will be providing data transparency and intelligence services to help CBA monitor ongoing customer activity to mitigate potential threats and to comply with regulatory guidance. 

The pilot program will start to rollout in the coming weeks and more features will be added to account holders in 2022. 

The pilot will start off with 10 selected crypto assets on offer including Bitcoin, Etherum, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, Uniswap, Chainlink, Polygon, Filecoin, Aave and Compound. 

CBA signaled its plans to expand its token offering in the future, keeping customers in a suspended state of excitement. 

Bridging the gap between digital currencies and traditional banking

This is a growing market. There are currently over 300 million people using crypto, all over the world. This number is growing in Australia too and it won’t stop growing anytime soon. 

Australia's big four knew that if people were to ever massively adopt these currencies as a replacement for fiat money, there better be a seamless, safe, effective and readily available way for them to actually make the transactions and avoid fraud or bad experiences.