Wall Street gets new crypto rival after Texas bank completes regulatory pivot

A forty-year-old Texas bank is stepping onto the national stage to challenge Wall Street’s push to get a grip on the digital asset industry.

United Texas Bank (UTB) secured approval from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) to convert from a state-chartered financial institution into a nationally chartered bank on May 15, Scott Beck, the president and CEO of the firm, told CoinDesk on Wednesday.

The conversion move, Beck added, is to position his crypto-friendly bank as the primary bridge between the cryptocurrency industry and traditional financial institutions and to provide digital asset services he said the UTB has years fully delivering, while “Wall Street continues to tiptoe.”

The conversion granted by the OCC came with two conditions that Beck said have now been met. “Those conditions were satisfied as of today, May 27,” he said. Since 2024, the UTB operated under a Consent Order with the Federal Reserve, which related to its Bank Secrecy Act and compliance infrastructure.

“Rather than viewing that as a setback, we treated it as a mandate to build something exceptional, and we did. The result is UTB PRISM SENTINAL, our proprietary BSA/AML compliance platform,” he said.

The milestone makes the UTB one of the first banks in the U.S. to successfully complete an OCC conversion since the passage of the Dodd-Frank Act 15 years ago, Beck added. He said the conversion also uniquely positions UTB as a bridge between crypto firms worldwide into the U.S. banking system, access that very few banks today are willing to give.

“The concept for United Texas Bank is a centralized value hub,” said the chair of UTB, a bank he himself said is unknown nationally, but widely sought out by crypto firms.

“If you’re a digital asset player, you can’t get an account at a Bank of America or a Citibank. You can come to United Texas Bank and basically have full access to the U.S. dollar,” he said, adding that his bank has been providing services to reputable crypto firms for about five years, handling over $120 billion in transactions for them yearly.

Standing with the giants

Beck explained that the strategic OCC conversion places the Dallas-based institution on par with money-center giants like Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase, granting it identical federal licensure, full trust powers and direct access to the Federal Reserve’s wire and ACH systems, while retaining the FDIC insurance it had.

However, unlike traditional Wall Street firms that are beginning to explore the crypto ecosystem, UTB already “underpins a massive chunk of global crypto liquidity, clearing $10 billion a month in U.S dollar volume for foreign banks, over-the-counter (OTC) desks and major exchanges.

UTB is not alone in the race for a competitive place within the growing crypto sector in the United States. Last week, Minnesota signed into law new rules allowing local banks to fight Wall Street for cryptocurrency profit. The state banks and credit unions joined forces with lawmakers to push legislation granting them authorization to provide crypto custody services to their clients.

For UTB, the conversion marks an ambitious operational pivot, Beck added. While crypto startups have spent years chasing limited, trust-only charters that bar them from the Federal Reserve’s payment rails, UTB’s national charter bypasses those restrictions entirely.

A U.S. first

“We are the first to move across to the national banking stage with full access to the Federal Reserve for wires and ACH,” Beck added.

By shifting away from the Texas Department of Banking and positioning itself directly under the OCC, UTB aligned its corporate structure with the executive branch of the federal government, shielding its clients from the fractured regulatory landscape that historically choked crypto firms, Beck said.

To capitalize further on its federal upgrade, the bank is launching UTB Atomic, an artificial intelligence-driven, real-time payment network engineered to bring back the round-the-clock liquidity infrastructure that collapsed when Silvergate and Signature Bank did.

In a 24/7 crypto market, traditional bank closures create massive settlement bottlenecks for institutional traders operating at 3:00 a.m.. UTB Atomic solves this by enabling instant, off-balance-sheet clearing between institutional clients while a parallel AI network, UTB Prism Sentinel, continuously conducts real-time blockchain surveillance to neutralize compliance risks, Beck explained.

“The biggest issue that faces the larger financial institutions is the ability to actually track what’s happening as the payments are coming through,” Beck said, adding that the system is purpose-built to navigate upcoming regulatory thresholds like the federal stablecoin frameworks under the GENIUS Act and Clarity Act.

With a comprehensive digital asset custody and full-service trust department slated to launch this summer, UTB aims to bridge traditional finance and crypto and positioning itself as the native financial plumbing for the next era of global commerce, Beck said.