Morgan Stanley’s OCC Application Is Wall Street Colonizing Crypto’s Back Office

Take, for example, the news that blue-chip global bank Morgan Stanley submitted an application to the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) for a charter for a new institution called “Morgan Stanley Digital Trust, National Association” as a national trust bank with requested trust powers.

In earlier eras, the news that Morgan Stanley had applied to form a national trust bank focused on digital asset activities would have had the impact of a tidal wave. Today, Morgan Stanley is just one institution seeking a charter from the OCC in a growing line of them.

But the decision by Morgan Stanley to apply for a cryptocurrency-focused national trust charter could deserve more scrutiny. It may very well signal a tidal wave.

The goal for the new institution is less Morgan Stanley is launching a crypto exchange and more Morgan Stanley is trying to own the custody, settlement and fiduciary plumbing layer of blockchain finance under U.S. bank supervision.

The Morgan Stanley Digital Trust charter won’t be for a branch, product line or subsidiary license tweak. The application is an attempt to stand up a new federally chartered legal entity optimized for digital asset activity. In other words, the regulatory template surrounding digital assets may now be stable enough for Tier-1 banks to scale into it.

Read also: Banks and Stablecoin Wallets Battle for Digital Cash’s Front Door

Why the Trust Bank Charter Matters

Morgan Stanley isn’t getting into crypto but is positioning itself to be a federally regulated custodian and infrastructure provider for what could be a coming tokenized financial system.

To understand the significance of the move, one must understand the peculiar role of the national trust bank charter. Unlike a traditional commercial bank, a trust bank does not take deposits or make loans. Its core functions revolve around custody, fiduciary services and asset administration. It is, in effect, a highly regulated vault combined with a legal steward.

It’s a structure that may turn out to be ideally suited to digital assets.

Crypto markets have long lacked what institutional investors require most, which is a qualified, federally supervised custodian capable of safeguarding assets, settling transactions and managing operational risk at scale. Exchanges and startups attempted to fill that role, often with uneven governance and fragile balance sheets. The collapses and scandals of recent years underscored that institutional capital would not fully engage until the custody problem was solved within a familiar regulatory perimeter.

The trust bank charter offers a solution. It allows a firm to handle digital assets under the supervision of the OCC while avoiding the capital and liquidity requirements associated with deposit-taking institutions. In regulatory terms, it is a bridge. In strategic terms, it could be an on-ramp for traditional finance to take over functions once dominated by crypto-native firms.

See also: Behind the Stablecoin Buzz, Old-School Infrastructure Still Runs the Show

Competing for the Back Office of a Tokenized Economy

Crypto-native firms aren’t blind to the growth possibilities of becoming regulated infrastructure providers and trust banks themselves. Crypto.com announced Monday (Feb. 23) it had gotten conditional governmental approval for a bank charter. The approval follows the OCC’s granting of conditional bank charters late last year to several companies in the digital asset space, including Circle, Ripple and BitGo.

The race now underway is not for trading volume but for control of what might be called the “digital asset back office.” Whoever provides custody, settlement and fiduciary services for tokenized assets will occupy a position analogous to today’s clearinghouses and custodial banks, steady, lucrative and deeply embedded in market structure.

It is tempting to interpret each institutional crypto initiative as a directional bet on digital currencies themselves. That framing misses the deeper transformation underway. The real wager is on the gradual digitization of financial ownership and transfer mechanisms, regardless of which specific tokens ultimately succeed.

For all PYMNTS digital transformation coverage, subscribe to the daily Digital Transformation Newsletter.