CEO Brian T. Moynihan simply said “no” in response to a question on whether the banking giant was missing out on cryptocurrencies
In a recent interview with Yahoo! Finance, Bank of America CEO Brian T. Moynihan stressed that the banking giant was in no hurry to dip its toes into cryptocurrency.
“We are not losing anything. We are running payments through the roof,” Moynihan said.
Recognizing cross-border payments as a legitimate use case for the cryptocurrency, Moynihan said that tighter regulation prevents it from being associated with the nascent asset class.
Bank of America is limited to researching cryptocurrencies on the business side, but it cannot extend to managing customers’ accounts with digital assets. As U.Today reports, the bank created its own dedicated crypto research team last July.
“They’ve said ‘before you do that you have to ask us, and don’t ask that way.’ That was basically the tone,” Moynihan commented on the regulatory investigation.
Moynihan underscored the fact that his bank has made significant progress in terms of digitization:“So, the reality is we run a payments business on our platform. It was trillions of dollars a day. And almost all digital.”
According to Bank of America’s most recent earnings call, digital channels account for 53% of customers’ sales. Moynihan estimates that the bank has 54 million digital users.
The banker also acknowledged that Bank of America has “hundreds” of patents on blockchain. In fact, it saw an 86% increase in blockchain-related patents in 2021.
Despite accumulating more blockchain patents than any other financial firm in the world, Bank of America isn’t necessarily sold on the technology. In 2019, Kathy Besant, a member of the bank’s executive management board, said she was bearish on blockchain.