Sberbank and Alfa-Bank, the two biggest banks in Russia, are planning to test cryptocurrency investment portfolios for private customers.
The service will be based on the six most reliable cryptocurrencies and will use algorithms to make investment decisions. According to the report, the banks are doing this because of interest from wealthy individual clients.
Both of these institutions are experimenting with cryptocurrency to offer their clients shares in a special fund which will be trading important currencies in major exchanges. The two cryptocurrency platforms that the banks are working with are Kraken and Bitstamp. At the moment, these are the 18th and the 24th most important cryptocurrency exchanges in the market.
Sberbank Private Banking deputy chair Ana Ivanchuk said,
“We’d like to offer our clients an absolutely transparent way to invest in digital assets with a full compliance with regulations that will let them invest in the product they are interested in Russia,”
Anton Rakhmanov, managing director of Alfa-Bank’s private wealth management department, said,
“Our goal is to accelerate the adoption of a decision on the recognition of the CFA investment assets and introduce them into the legal field as quickly as possible.”
The two portfolios are called Perceptron R and Perceptron RQ, and they will be tested in the central bank’s regulatory sandbox – a closed testing environment where financial technology can be developed without fear of breaking the law.
The portfolio will include leading cryptocurrencies including bitcoin (BTC), bitcoin cash (BCH), ethereum (ETH) and Litecoin (LTC). The combinations of the cryptos included in portfolio will be revised once a quarter and their proportions balanced using a trading algorithm. The pilot process is expected to take around 45 days.
