Citi wants to make bitcoin bankable as Wall Street builds native crypto infrastructure

Citigroup (C) 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.

Nisha Surendran, who heads Citi’s digital asset custody product buildout, described the initiative in a speech at the World Strategy Forum on Thursday as an effort to “make bitcoin bankable.”

That begins with institutional-grade key management and wallet infrastructure. But, Surendran said, the ambition is broader: to bring bitcoin into the same custody, reporting and control frameworks that clients already use for traditional assets.

“We will be offering our clients a single service model across crypto, securities and money,” said Surendran, who announced these plans during the World Strategy 2026 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.”

Client demand

One of the reasons Citi is moving towards bankable bitcoin is because of 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.

She described a future account structure in which multiple asset types sit under a single master safekeeping or custody account, including U.S. Treasuries, foreign bonds, tokenized money market funds, and bitcoin.

“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. Institutional investors have been seeking exposure to the sector from traditional financial institutions for several years. What began with BlackRock offering exchange-traded funds to help more investors gain exposure has now spread to numerous banks and financial institutions, which continue to integrate their legacy financial services into the digital assets sector.

For example, 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 E*TRADE 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.

Building for a 24/7 market

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. Something similar to what another banking giant, JPMorgan, has done with its JPM Coin.

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.

The 24/7 market is also something institutional clients have been asking legacy financial institutions for. The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) said last month that it plans to introduce an around-the-clock, blockchain-based trading venue for tokenized stocks and exchange-traded funds later this year.

NYSE’s main competitor in the U.S., Nasdaq, revealed in December that it was planning to facilitate nearly round-the-clock trading for stocks and exchange-traded products (ETPs), in a bid to match the increasingly global nature of financial markets and investor beh