The United States Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) has received over 90 responses from various stakeholders’ in the financial services sector on its advanced notice of proposed rulemaking (ANPR) issued last month.
This independent bureau which operates under the U.S Treasury made highlights in July after it was approved for banks within its jurisdiction to act as crypto custodians. From the responses on the ANPR, some banks including PNC and the U.S are actually interested in scaling operations into the crypto scene.
With the OCC still at the initial stages towards rulemaking, some figures in the industry believe that now is the best time for innovators to give their input to the agency. Prominent firms that aired their views on the OCC ANPR for digital currency policies include Visa, Facebook’s Novi, Stripe, ConsenSys and Google which even suggested that the OCC should incentivize FinTech developments through hackathons, pilots and innovation competitions.
Industry Stakeholders Take!
A few issues appeared to have been more common for most of the stakeholders who gave their feedback before the August 3 deadline. The American Bankers Association (ABA) which wrote a letter as part of its contribution mainly highlighted the need for a consensus in taxonomy and terminology amongst other areas for the integration to happen seamlessly. The ABA letter reads,
“Effective policy analysis on crypto assets is essential to maintaining banks’ capacity to innovate, but it may be inhibited by the lack of common terminology. A common taxonomy and understanding of crypto assets’ risks and features, broadly consistent and coordinated across all the relevant regulators, is essential to fostering prudent innovation within a sound risk management framework.”
User protection policies were also highlighted in terms of privacy and security given the delicate balance needed to maintain some fundamental aspects of cryptocurrencies. Coin Center’s Research Director, Peter Van Vulkenburgh, was of the opinion that banks can actually provide privacy and surveil their clients’ activities through private coin and other features within crypto ecosystems. These sentiments on privacy and security were also echoed by MasterCard’s Tina Woo as she went to highlight the underlying potential,
“We believe cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology hold the potential to enhance operational resiliency, improve auditability, and enable new functionalities.”
Finally, an interesting perspective was raised by 3rd party crypto service providers which appear to be in favor of banks sub-contracting for critical crypto services. BitGo which has been a crypto custodian for over a year is one of the stakeholders’ who are of this view. Interestingly, the firm has the backing of payments giants Visa and MasterCard which are both eyeing the crypto card market and have been making strategic moves in the recent past. Ky Tran-Trong, Visa’s VP for Global Regulatory Affairs, confirmed this position,
“Our objective is to enable digital currency users to spend from their digital currency balance using a Visa debit or prepaid credential anywhere Visa is accepted.”
