According to SEBA Bank CEO Guido Buehler, the license for liquid crypto funds will attract more investments. Regulators gave SEBA Bank permission to offer Swiss-domiciled mutual funds digital assets. This is the first such license to be issued in the country. It was granted by the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA), constitutes a new liquid investment funds enabler with crypto, and allows SEBA to act as a custodian bank.
Usually, crypto fund structures come with a lock-in of liquidity and clients who want to get in or out incur hefty costs. That may be a thing of the past now. Buehler told CoinDesk in an interview:
“This collective investment scheme license allows institutional clients, and then later retail clients, to invest into crypto assets on a liquid basis through fund structures. It means there is now the opportunity for institutions to establish their fund structures for crypto as a liquid asset, so people can subscribe today and can sell tomorrow. Institutional adoption is only at the beginning since a lot of institutional capabilities are still lagging (behind) market demand.”
In May, SEBA entered into a partnership with Tokensoft International AG to offer entities looking to issue their own security tokens customized tokenization. SEBA designs and issues tokens according to the entity’s specific needs and manages them once they go live.
Switzerland is a crypto and digital asset pioneer
As US and Chinese cryptocurrency crackdowns depress markets, Switzerland seems to be marching to the beat of its own drum. In February, the Swiss government gave tokenized security trading on a blockchain the same legal status as fiat and other traditional asset trade. Swiss legislators adapted legislation to integrate concrete distributed ledger technology features into the existing laws. Under these amendments, tokenized securities are recognized as a new asset class, with legal ownership rights transferred to each new investor via the blockchain automatically.
Alexander Vogel, a partner at Swiss law firm Meyerlustenberger Lachenal, commented:
“Previously, you had uncertificated rights there that had to be assigned, and a lot of smart people were looking at how that could be done on-chain. With these new registered rights, it’s clear that you have legal certainty. If they are properly transferred on a blockchain, the new owner who holds them in his or her wallet is definitely the owner of these rights.”
Buehler estimates that in 2022, crypto will comprise around 3% of investment portfolios, about the same share as gold.
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