The five services every bank will offer in digital assets by 2028

Banks like to talk about digital asset custody because it feels tangible. It is a product that can be launched, regulated, marketed and benchmarked against competitors. It provides a straightforward answer to the question of how a bank enters digital assets. But custody is not just a business, it’s an entry point.

By 2028, no institutional client will choose a banking partner only because it offers secure storage of digital assets. They will choose a partner because that enables them to provide additional services: issue tokenised assets, move value instantly, generate returns on assets which would otherwise be sitting idle, execute trades efficiently or unlock new forms of financing. Custody matters not only for security, but also because every one of those services depends upon it.

This distinction is becoming increasingly important. Many banks are still approaching digital assets as a sequence of disconnected products. First custody, then perhaps tokenisation, later on payments and eventually financing. Each capability becomes a separate programme with its own governance, technology decisions and implementation timeline. On paper, this appears sensible. In practice, it creates an operating model that becomes progressively harder to extend every time a new capability is introduced.

The banks that dominate institutional digital assets over the next few years will not necessarily be those that launched custody first. They will be the ones who recognised from the outset that custody was simply the foundation upon which a much broader business would be built.

By the end of the decade, every serious institutional digital asset proposition is likely to revolve around five core services:

Issuance

Whether issuing stablecoins, tokenised deposits, money market funds, bonds or other real-world assets, banks will increasingly become platforms for creating digital financial instruments rather than simply holding them. The growth of tokenisation means custody is no longer simply about safekeeping assets after they exist; it becomes part of the lifecycle of creating, governing and administering those assets from inception.

Payments

Digital assets become valuable when they move. Institutional clients increasingly want programmable settlement, cross-border transfers, treasury movements and atomic payment mechanisms that remove friction from existing financial infrastructure. Stablecoins are accelerating this shift, but the broader opportunity lies in integrating digital assets into everyday corporate and institutional payment flows.

Yield

Institutional clients are not looking for digital wallets full of dormant assets. They expect assets to work. Whether that comes through staking, tokenised money market funds, repo markets or other yield-generating mechanisms, banks will increasingly need to provide safe and regulated ways for clients to deploy digital assets rather than simply store them.

Trading and Settlement

Digital assets enable new models for exchanging value, assets and collateral between institutions. Atomic settlement mechanisms can reduce operational friction by linking asset and payment movements within a single workflow, while tokenised markets create opportunities for more efficient transfers of ownership across financial ecosystems. Custody becomes integrated into these processes, ensuring assets can move securely between counterparties, venues and settlement networks. Clients will increasingly expect banks to support the full lifecycle of asset exchange and settlement rather than viewing custody as a separate function.

Financing

Collateral management, securities lending, digital asset-backed borrowing and liquidity provision all depend upon trusted custody infrastructure. As tokenised assets become acceptable forms of collateral, financing becomes one of the most commercially significant services banks can offer. The institutions that capture this opportunity will not simply safeguard assets; they will enable entirely new balance sheet strategies for their clients.

Connecting the Dots

None of these capabilities exists in isolation. Issuance requires payment infrastructure to distribute assets efficiently. Trading depends on settlement. Financing depends on custody and settlement. Yield products require robust governance over asset ownership and movement. Every service reinforces every other service. That interconnectednessis precisely why operating model decisions matter so much.

Many institutions continue to think about capability expansion as adding products one by one. Unfortunately, every new service introduces another layer of integration, another governance model, another approval process and another technology interface. What begins as a relatively clean custody platform gradually evolves into an increasingly fragmented architecture where every enhancement requires significant rebuilding underneath.

If custody has been designed only to support safekeeping, introducing staking changes authorisation processes. Adding token issuance changes governance requirements. Introducing financing alters risk management. Supporting off-exchange settlement creates new operational workflows. Every new business line stretches assumptions that were embedded in the original design. Eventually, the organisation finds itself rebuilding the very foundations that were intended to accelerate growth.

This pattern has been repeated across financial services before. Banks that treated mobile banking as simply another channel eventually rebuilt their entire customer platforms. Institutions that viewed cloud as infrastructure rather than an operating model spent years unpicking architectural decisions that limited future expansion. Digital assets present exactly the same strategic challenge.

The question executives should be asking today is not which capability they should launch first. Custody may well be the right commercial entry point. For many institutions, it almost certainly is. The more important question is whether the operating model being implemented today can naturally support the business the bank expects to run in two years’ time?

The institutions that succeed by 2028 will not necessarily be those with the longest list of digital asset products. They will be those whose operating model was designed to carry all five capabilities from day one, even if they chose to launch them sequentially. Because by the time institutional demand has matured, clients will no longer just be buying custody. They will be buying everything custody makes possible. The irony is that many institutions will believe they are moving quickly because they launched custody early. In reality, they may simply have arrived first but at the wrong destination.