Big Banks Now Wanting to Bring in Bitcoin as Part of their Financial Services

by Kenneth Schortgen, The Daily Economist:

Earlier this morning a representative of Barclay’s bank spoke with the business analysts over at CNBC and discussed how the European financial giant is looking at ways to bring Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies into their portfolio of financial services.

British multinational bank Barclays has been in discussions with regulators about bringing digital currencies like bitcoin into service, CNBC reported citing the bank’s UK chief executive Ashok Vaswani.

“We have been talking to a couple of fintechs [financial technology firms – Ed.] and have actually gone with the fintechs to the FCA [Britain’s Financial Conduct Authority – Ed.] to talk about how we could bring, the equivalent of bitcoin, not necessarily bitcoin, but cryptocurrencies into play,” Vaswani told CNBC.

According to him, it’s an “obviously new area we’ve got to be careful with…””(We’re) working on it, (it’s) not ready for prime time, we’ll get there soon,” he added without giving any other details.

Barclays has been experimenting with bitcoin and working with digital currency start-ups. The bank wants customers to be able to receive bitcoin payments directly in their accounts. – Russia Today

What is perhaps most interesting is that this announcement comes on the same day that the largest U.S. cryptocurrency exchange crashed or went offline due to the extreme amount of transactions taking place right now in the digital currency sphere.

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