Yves Longchamp on SEBA Bank’s digital asset services and Abu Dhabi expansion

0:01i am ashton addison from block west capital for investment pitch media and the crypto coin show and today on blockchain interviews with eves long champ head of research at seba bank eaves welcome to the show and thank you so much for taking the time thank you for the invitation thank you you're very welcome let's dive into it so many banks are waking up to become

0:23neo banks crypto banks offering more and more digital asset financial products and services into the traditional world um i'm guessing you have a traditional background prior to crypto so let's jump into that i'd love to hear your just your background as an economist and what first got you interested into moving into digital assets and then we can dive

0:43into saberbank yes sure yeah indeed so i'm a i'm an economist i i first worked for the swiss national bank and i've always been interested in the role of money in the society and finance in general and i was just realizing that everything is becoming really digital and the next step about money is probably to to become digital as well i think that money has changed over time with the

1:07society with regulation with technology and i think this is a kind of new iteration i was really interested in having a deep dive into it this is why i decided to go into into crypto actually amazing and can you tell us a little bit about save a bank and um is it a traditional bank as well and moving into crypto or what's the story there no actually uh ceba bank is a new bank

1:31we've got the swiss banking license a few years ago and we apply for a banking license so actually we have the same banking license as any other swiss bank bus we have a twist and the tourist is about crypto so it's all about crypto so it's crypto first and we offer also uh traditional services but it's really targeted to crypto so we are not uh tradition by moving to crypto we are

1:54more a crypto bank really made for that uh design and so for uh yeah supporting all assets and services linked to the to the crypto activity very cool and it seems like more and more financial products are coming out in the crypto world that are tying in traditional finance and and digital assets um not just you know holding spot bitcoin there's all these other

2:19financial products maybe you can talk a little bit about what's the bread and butter of ceba bank and and what are you focusing on in the digital asset space yes actually the idea is really to bridge both the world of digital asset and traditional assets and so i would say that most of our clients are traditional um investor institutional investors wanted

2:41to jump into it and having a first first um experience with that and the idea is to simplify as possible because this is a very complex world to enter into it especially when you have you know you need some special system to to book your crypto and so on so the first id is to provide them possibility to customize all the cryptocurrency directly in the

3:03bank and secondly we want your folks you see some financial services to it can be either you can have a typical financial services like buying etp or etf which are typical financial products you can have options on a different cryptocurrency you can also enhance uh the yield with some kind of staking you can also get credit if you got a few bitcoins and at home and you

3:28know you want to keep it because you expect the price to go up but still once you get some some fiat money to buy i don't know something that you know you need i mean we offer all all the kind of traditional banking services that really will crypto and background and i think this is something uh completely new so we really want to bridge both this one so if you're a

3:49traditional investor you can uh you know have access to a crypto as an asset class and if you are a native crypto and you know you want to open an account then you can benefit from the banking services that the typical universal bank offers very cool and being in the traditional space before i'm guessing you have uh in in switzerland and around that area you're

4:14familiar with uh what's going on and what's the discussion around you know the banks and institutions and where they're at and i'm curious from your perspective looking at institutional adoption and like how fast ceba bank is growing and with institutional clients moving into cryptocurrencies what are you seeing from that aspect yeah institutional investors are really

4:38on typical clients and we observe a lot of um a lot of interest and this is growing i remember i john 7 about three years ago and at that time people were very much let's say you know unfamiliar with the notion of bitcoin and cryptocurrency and so on and whether it will survive now i think this question are not anymore the case so bitcoin is here and i think they this is

5:03to stay what they want to know is how they can um invest in crypto especially in bitcoin what does it mean for their own portfolio is it really something new is it an emerging asset as does it offer diversification how can you have some encryption to your portfolio without being too uh annoyed with with the high volatility so we have this kind of uh

5:27first id so this is where uh most of the people came and then we also observed that you we have a let's say a second generation so a second type of question which is coming is they many people also see um blockchain as a new operating system for value so you can really transfer or store any kind of value it can be monetary but also non-monetary value

5:50your identity for example or i don't know ownership and they are also interested in investing into an environment which is linked to this technology and i think this is something which is which is coming and obviously switzerland which is a financial uh financial system there are also some banks thinking about what it would mean for the future of finance whether

6:14this is and this is all about d5 for even decentralized finance whether they will take the place of centralized finance whether there will be a kind of a link between both of them so i think it comes from a very broad environment but most of them are interested in the potentials it offers in terms of investment that's great to hear eaves and being the head of research at

6:37ceva bank you know there's so many different faucets of digital assets because it seems like it's moving into almost every single industry that either stores data or has transactions you know and can innovate all of these technologies so how do you keep up with these innovations and how do you narrow down the focus to make sure that you're researching the right

6:59aspects of digital assets yeah that's very difficult because it's a fast-moving environment there are thousands of new things developing on a daily basis luckily i'm not alone and i can i can really rely on a great team actually we also decided to focus on a few angles the first one is uh we consider uh crypto asset as an emerging asset

7:26plan and we would like to understand what are the fundamentals behind so whether it's cheap you know is it is it attractive to buy bitcoin at 40 plus um is it too high we want you to look at all the to build let's say all the information that a typical investors institution investor would look at to make its own decision so that's the first element really trying

7:52to understand this asset class the second is to further regulations because our clients are mainly institutional investors and you know they want to go into it they want to be sure that they don't make any mistakes and uh that regulation is playing with them so actually we also um follow very carefully development of regulation and i must say that regulation is coming and

8:17it's quite good because it creates a lot of clarity for institutional investors and finally which is something which is absolutely key to start a discussion this is about education so we also write a few reports which are purely educational explaining the basic concepts so education regulation investment are the key pillar of our definitely and i'm glad you mentioned

8:43about the education i feel like even knowledgeable institutional investors could benefit from more educational pieces just because the industry is moving so fast and i'm curious if you've made that in an official section of ceba bank of like keeping your clients educated and informed of new topics and just you know the foundations actually yeah you you mentioned you

9:08mentioned education actually there is two way we provide education the first one is via our educational uh uh publication called the bridge which is really to bridge traditional with uh with uh with digital uh with digital finance i would say and the other one is called separate cities is something completely different it's a department which is uh here to provide

9:30education to be assault leader to imagine the future of the future of finance and also to help um you know bankers i mean the whole banking system to understand what it means what is a blockchain what is cryptocurrency what are the benefits where do we go with that and this is a way and we think this is part of our mission also to explain and to demystify i would say to educate it

9:55to the mystify definitely and you mentioned at the beginning uh about staking and how there can be extra yield from that now with d5 growing so quickly you know there are more stabilized centralized finance providers that are helping with staking but there's also the world of of djan d5 and like totally decentralized and with higher yields and more volatility as

10:19well how deep have you looked into that and how cautious uh do neo-banks of an approach take into moving into true well the way we do it i think uh have a concrete example so we are a whitelister for rvr for example and the idea is really to again to to make the bridge and to offer new types of services obviously we have staking so we

10:48have also some staking possibilities for a few uh currencies so you can get staking and we take care of the risk of you know who is validating and you have some insurance and so on but i think i think more important this is really about defining how you can merge define how you can create an environment where institutional investors are ready to to uh put their money into it so you

11:11need to find a pool where even if you don't know who is part of the pool we're swimming in the pool you want to know that they are all clean so you need to um provide kyc know your clients and also aml anti-money laundering a check and to my knowledge we are the first time to offer this white listing and uh that would be that the project will this will

11:33be soon be launched but actually we are there i think it's quite interesting because we are just opening the doors to uh decentralized finance and decentralized finance is likely to commoditize a lot of services that banks offers so it can be just exchanges currency invested borrowing lending and so on and i think this is very first step so i look forward to hear what the feedback

11:57is for our clients but i'm very optimistic about this type of development because i think there will be a merge between digital finance and let's say tradify yeah it's very exciting and great to hear about the ave uh part there and now i've read at the beginning of the year that ceba bank closed a 110 million dollar in in swiss uh

12:24round for the latest round of financing so first of all congratulations that's amazing um and i would like to know from there you know how does save event continue to grow and what is that capital going to be used for and what are the main focuses for this year and next growing sure yeah we have based on growth last year and it seems to continue which

12:47is very good so we are happy to get additional funding to uh to expand there are different ways we want to expand first of all we would like to go to asia so we just opened uh a branch in abu dhabi uh which is fine but you want to go further east and then to go to asia which is again for the next destination and the thing is we want to strengthen all position also in the

13:13in the markets where we really cover about 25 markets and we need to you know we are still a small bank and we need to expand we need to strengthen we need there are many ways when we can do that and obviously uh one way to do it is to is to hire people so we will need some extra head counts definitely definitely and when you keep mentioning you know

13:35bridging defy and digital assets into traditional finance what do you think is going to be the key factor to success for ceba bank at least in ensuring that there is a successful bridge from traditional investors into the new world yeah i i think that if we focus on institutional investors i think that to have a bank lease license is really key because they have a you

14:02know we we are similar to the people that i used to talk to and so it's very easy for for them to come to us and i think so we are nice way to open the door so they can trust they can trust us because we follow the rules that exist in the in the traditional space this is this is what they see and uh this is how obviously what we offer but behind we have also not only bankers we

14:30are also blockchain engineers we have a lot of i.t people working to make the bridge to to simplify all the complexity and to offer the different services and to make it easy and to explain as well so i think that's this is probably one way to finance money let's say from the traditional sector to digital assets and the other way around is to bring this money back i mean if you're a

14:55crypto native and you want to bring your money back i think we know that's one of the difficulties to have it in let's say the the financial systems because you can be extremely rich in bitcoin that's fine happy for you but at the same you know you maybe want to buy a house or to buy a car to buy something and then you you need to go back and i think if you the

15:16ways also to bring to bring this money then offering you know typical expense with 24 24 7 trading uh great custody solutions and then you can bring your money you can spend it you can use it you can get credit as i mentioned so i think it really goes both way and a bank even though in the decentralized environments of blockchain when everything is peer-to-peer i think a

15:41bank makes sense to bridge these two words and really going both ways definitely and right now you you know we talked a lot about institutional investors are you guys mainly focusing on that or is it sort of open to other kinds of clients as well if they are interested in learning more about safety actually we are mainly focusing on institutional investor which can be

16:09really an institution per se or it can be private private individual but we do not uh focus now on on on retail on the retail sector for the time being but actually if um if you know prospects are integrated they they can have a look at their website www.sebad.swiss and then they will find all the relevant information amazing well thank you so much eaves for

16:34coming on the show i really do appreciate it i'm really excited to see how save a bank expands into abu dhabi as you mentioned and the rest of asia let's definitely follow up later this year to catch up about all of the regulatory improvements and just how save a bank is growing so thank you so much for your time and let's follow up in the near future

16:54sure thank you very much you