Sygnum's Dori: Why Banks Finally Warmed to Bitcoin

A decade ago, most banks kept their distance from Bitcoin. Today, several of the same institutions run custody services, trading desks and tokenization pilots for digital assets. Fabian Dori, investment chief at the Swiss bank Sygnum, lays out what changed in an interview with BTC-ECHO.

Sygnum itself has been part of that shift since 2019, when it became, by its own account, the first bank for digital assets worldwide. Dori points to Switzerland's regulatory groundwork as a key reason the country's banks moved early. In 2021, Switzerland put in place comprehensive legal frameworks for blockchain technologies, giving institutions a clearer basis on which to build products around digital assets.

That early move, Dori argues, is why \"Switzerland remains a leading global crypto hub\" today. Sygnum is currently part of a consortium working on a stablecoin sandbox alongside UBS, PostFinance and Raiffeisenbanken, an effort that brings together some of the country's largest banking names around a shared digital-asset initiative.

Regulation as the turning point

Switzerland was not alone. Since 2021, Dori notes, the EU, Singapore, Hong Kong, the United Arab Emirates and the USA have all significantly advanced their own regulatory frameworks for digital assets. He cites the Swiss DLT legislation, the EU's MiCAR regime and the GENIUS Act in the United States as the key pieces of regulation that have given institutions a clearer footing.

For Dori, this regulatory build-out is one of four developments he identifies as decisive in pushing traditional financial institutions toward greater engagement with digital assets. The others are the emergence of institutional market infrastructure, the potential of tokenization, and the rise of stablecoins. Together, he suggests, these four factors explain why banks that once avoided the asset class now actively build around it.

Converging worlds

Asked about the broader direction of travel between traditional finance and the digital asset sector, Dori is direct: \"Convergence is already well advanced.\" The stablecoin sandbox work with UBS, PostFinance and Raiffeisenbanken is, in his telling, one concrete expression of that convergence, with established retail and private banks now sitting at the same table as crypto-native institutions to build shared infrastructure.

Taken together, Dori's account traces a path from regulatory uncertainty to a landscape where clear rules, in Switzerland and increasingly in other major financial centres, have allowed banks to move from the sidelines into active participation in digital asset markets.