Every single bank will soon need to hold digital assets. Very few know how to
16 Sep 2026
Anoosh Arevshatian, chief product officer at Zodia Solutions, examines the operating gap holding banks back from taking digital assets into production, and why a new infrastructure model is needed to move beyond pilots and operate at scale
Image: estar_2020/stock.adobe.com
Institutional adoption of digital assets is now a question of when, not if. Regulatory frameworks are landing across jurisdictions. Client demand is rising across asset managers, corporates, custodians, and family offices. Stablecoins are becoming payments infrastructure. Tokenised money market funds have moved from experiment to product.
The strategic question is no longer whether financial institutions will operate in digital assets — it is how they build the operating capability to do so. That is where most institutional strategies stall.
Financial institutions have spent the last five years running pilots, evaluating vendors, building proofs of concept, and standing up small teams. The technology has largely proven itself. What has not been solved is the operating layer: how a regulated bank actually runs a digital asset business alongside its existing operations, under the same governance, risk framework, audit standards, and regulatory obligations that apply to everything else it does.
Most banks are still in projects and very few are running digital asset businesses at scale.
The operating gap
The reasons for that gap are structural, not technological, as explored in our recent report. The commercial case is harder to prove than the technical one. Institutions can demonstrate feasibility in a controlled environment. Demonstrating revenue generation, cost reduction, and sustained client demand takes longer, requires production-scale operations, and depends on services beyond custody itself.
Operating models are not designed for digital assets. Banks have spent decades building processes around payments, custody, treasury, controls, and account hierarchies that reflect how traditional financial assets move. Digital assets challenge those models in ways that touch every function — from key management to reconciliation, from transaction monitoring to client onboarding, from settlement to reporting.
Digital asset operations require expertise across technology, regulation, compliance, security, and the underlying ecosystem. People who bridge all of it are rare, and institutions cannot hire fast enough to keep pace with the strategic ambitions their boards have already agreed.
Pilot success is not production readiness. What works in a controlled test breaks under real client volume, jurisdictional complexity, and the operational load of running the platform every day.
Global deployment introduces reconciliation, reporting, exception management, and permissioning requirements that a pilot rarely exposes.
The cost curve also arrives before the revenue curve. New technology, specialist staff, legal reviews, security frameworks, and control processes all need to be introduced at the same time. Building the full stack in-house typically becomes a multi-year engineering programme, and one that often stalls under security review long before it delivers commercial return.
None of these are technology problems. They are operating model problems. That is why sophisticated institutional buyers who assume they can build digital asset infrastructure themselves so frequently find that the hardest work is the part that is not the technology at all.
A new operating layer
What financial institutions need is not another point solution, another wallet provider, or another API to integrate. They need an operating capability. A layer that sits between their core banking systems and the blockchain in which the digital asset business is actually run.
A layer that reflects how a regulated financial institution operates — and that is deployed inside its own environment, under its own governance, with its own controls in place from day one. That layer is what Zodia Solutions provides.
Zodia Solutions is the digital asset operating system for financial institutions. It is the operating layer between an institution’s core banking systems and the blockchain, designed to be deployed within the institution’s own environment, under its own regulatory footprint, and to reflect how a bank actually operates — not how a crypto-native platform expects a bank to adapt.
That distinction matters, because most digital asset infrastructure available today was built by crypto-native firms and later adapted for institutional use. Governance, audit trails, segregation of duties, jurisdictional controls, and reporting were retrofitted onto architectures designed for a different kind of buyer.
That approach can work at pilot scale but it rarely holds up in production, under multi-jurisdictional operations, or under the level of scrutiny that a bank’s internal risk, compliance, and audit functions apply.
Zodia Solutions is built the other way round. The operating principles come from running institutional digital asset custody at scale for global banks, asset managers, and market participants over the last five years.
The architecture is designed to meet regulated institutional standards from the outset.
The deployment model is built for banks that need their infrastructure to sit inside their own perimeter, not on a hosted platform they connect to.
The result is an operating layer that gives institutions the ability to run a digital asset business the same way they run every other regulated business: with their own keys, their own environment, their own governance, their own audit trail, and their own control of the client relationship.
From custody to capability
Custody is the entry point, rarely the destination. Once an institution has custody in place, its clients ask for the services that make the assets productive: staking, lending, tokenised collateral, off-exchange trading, stablecoin infrastructure.
Each of these services requires its own operating logic, its own controls, its own connectivity to the wider ecosystem — and each of them multiplies the operational complexity of the business.
An institution that builds each service as a separate infrastructure project will find itself managing multiple integrations, multiple reconciliation processes, multiple risk models, and multiple vendor relationships.
What starts as a digital asset programme becomes a fragmented estate that resists coherent governance and consumes disproportionate operational overheads.
Zodia Solutions is designed to prevent that fragmentation by carrying the operating logic once and extending it across every capability the institution decides to offer.
Custody, orchestration, policy enforcement, credit and limit checks, asset locking, reconciliation, reporting, and cross-chain connectivity all sit in one operating layer, deployed inside the institution’s own environment. New capabilities are added by configuration, not by starting again.
That model is what turns a digital asset project into a digital asset business.
The strategic shift
The next phase of institutional digital assets will separate the institutions that operate at scale from those that remain in pilot. It will consolidate the market around a smaller number of trusted providers with deep operating experience in regulated financial services, and it will move the strategic conversation from technology selection to operating model design.
Every major financial institution will soon need to hold digital assets. Very few will build the operating layer themselves.
The institutions that get to production first will be the ones that treat digital assets not as a technology project, but as an operating model and choose infrastructure designed to reflect it.
Two propositions define the moment. Banks need a new operating model for digital assets. Zodia Solutions is the operating system that provides it.
The strategic question is no longer whether financial institutions will operate in digital assets — it is how they build the operating capability to do so. That is where most institutional strategies stall.
Financial institutions have spent the last five years running pilots, evaluating vendors, building proofs of concept, and standing up small teams. The technology has largely proven itself. What has not been solved is the operating layer: how a regulated bank actually runs a digital asset business alongside its existing operations, under the same governance, risk framework, audit standards, and regulatory obligations that apply to everything else it does.
Most banks are still in projects and very few are running digital asset businesses at scale.
The operating gap
The reasons for that gap are structural, not technological, as explored in our recent report. The commercial case is harder to prove than the technical one. Institutions can demonstrate feasibility in a controlled environment. Demonstrating revenue generation, cost reduction, and sustained client demand takes longer, requires production-scale operations, and depends on services beyond custody itself.
Operating models are not designed for digital assets. Banks have spent decades building processes around payments, custody, treasury, controls, and account hierarchies that reflect how traditional financial assets move. Digital assets challenge those models in ways that touch every function — from key management to reconciliation, from transaction monitoring to client onboarding, from settlement to reporting.
Digital asset operations require expertise across technology, regulation, compliance, security, and the underlying ecosystem. People who bridge all of it are rare, and institutions cannot hire fast enough to keep pace with the strategic ambitions their boards have already agreed.
Pilot success is not production readiness. What works in a controlled test breaks under real client volume, jurisdictional complexity, and the operational load of running the platform every day.
Global deployment introduces reconciliation, reporting, exception management, and permissioning requirements that a pilot rarely exposes.
The cost curve also arrives before the revenue curve. New technology, specialist staff, legal reviews, security frameworks, and control processes all need to be introduced at the same time. Building the full stack in-house typically becomes a multi-year engineering programme, and one that often stalls under security review long before it delivers commercial return.
None of these are technology problems. They are operating model problems. That is why sophisticated institutional buyers who assume they can build digital asset infrastructure themselves so frequently find that the hardest work is the part that is not the technology at all.
A new operating layer
What financial institutions need is not another point solution, another wallet provider, or another API to integrate. They need an operating capability. A layer that sits between their core banking systems and the blockchain in which the digital asset business is actually run.
A layer that reflects how a regulated financial institution operates — and that is deployed inside its own environment, under its own governance, with its own controls in place from day one. That layer is what Zodia Solutions provides.
Zodia Solutions is the digital asset operating system for financial institutions. It is the operating layer between an institution’s core banking systems and the blockchain, designed to be deployed within the institution’s own environment, under its own regulatory footprint, and to reflect how a bank actually operates — not how a crypto-native platform expects a bank to adapt.
That distinction matters, because most digital asset infrastructure available today was built by crypto-native firms and later adapted for institutional use. Governance, audit trails, segregation of duties, jurisdictional controls, and reporting were retrofitted onto architectures designed for a different kind of buyer.
That approach can work at pilot scale but it rarely holds up in production, under multi-jurisdictional operations, or under the level of scrutiny that a bank’s internal risk, compliance, and audit functions apply.
Zodia Solutions is built the other way round. The operating principles come from running institutional digital asset custody at scale for global banks, asset managers, and market participants over the last five years.
The architecture is designed to meet regulated institutional standards from the outset.
The deployment model is built for banks that need their infrastructure to sit inside their own perimeter, not on a hosted platform they connect to.
The result is an operating layer that gives institutions the ability to run a digital asset business the same way they run every other regulated business: with their own keys, their own environment, their own governance, their own audit trail, and their own control of the client relationship.
From custody to capability
Custody is the entry point, rarely the destination. Once an institution has custody in place, its clients ask for the services that make the assets productive: staking, lending, tokenised collateral, off-exchange trading, stablecoin infrastructure.
Each of these services requires its own operating logic, its own controls, its own connectivity to the wider ecosystem — and each of them multiplies the operational complexity of the business.
An institution that builds each service as a separate infrastructure project will find itself managing multiple integrations, multiple reconciliation processes, multiple risk models, and multiple vendor relationships.
What starts as a digital asset programme becomes a fragmented estate that resists coherent governance and consumes disproportionate operational overheads.
Zodia Solutions is designed to prevent that fragmentation by carrying the operating logic once and extending it across every capability the institution decides to offer.
Custody, orchestration, policy enforcement, credit and limit checks, asset locking, reconciliation, reporting, and cross-chain connectivity all sit in one operating layer, deployed inside the institution’s own environment. New capabilities are added by configuration, not by starting again.
That model is what turns a digital asset project into a digital asset business.
The strategic shift
The next phase of institutional digital assets will separate the institutions that operate at scale from those that remain in pilot. It will consolidate the market around a smaller number of trusted providers with deep operating experience in regulated financial services, and it will move the strategic conversation from technology selection to operating model design.
Every major financial institution will soon need to hold digital assets. Very few will build the operating layer themselves.
The institutions that get to production first will be the ones that treat digital assets not as a technology project, but as an operating model and choose infrastructure designed to reflect it.
Two propositions define the moment. Banks need a new operating model for digital assets. Zodia Solutions is the operating system that provides it.
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