ABSA Group has become the first African bank to offer institutional digital-asset custody, joining global peers such as BNY Mellon and Standard Chartered-backed Zodia Custody that have built similar offerings in recent years as traditional financial institutions expand into cryptocurrencies and tokenised assets.

The Johannesburg-based lender said its ABSA Digital Asset Custody service is initially available to institutional clients in South Africa, including asset managers, non-bank financial institutions and corporates. The service provides for the safekeeping, administration and transfer of digital assets within a regulated banking environment. Custody arrangements are often a prerequisite for institutional participation, since mandates at asset managers, insurers and pension funds typically require digital holdings to sit with regulated custodians rather than on crypto-native exchanges.

The launch comes exactly one year after Ripple announced a strategic partnership with ABSA to provide digital-asset custody to the bank’s customers in South Africa. ABSA’s custody infrastructure was developed with digital-asset technology provider Ripple.

The platform currently supports Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP Ledger and USDC. ABSA plans to add other assets as demand develops. Bitcoin is currently the “pre-dominant asset held in custody,” said Rob Downes, Head of Digital Assets at ABSA’s Corporate and Investment Banking Unit.

ABSA said it received regulatory approval in South Africa for the service. South Africa declared crypto assets to be financial products in 2022 and has since licensed crypto asset service providers, giving regulated firms a framework in which to operate. The bank plans to extend the offering to additional client segments and other African markets, subject to regulatory approvals.

According to ABSA, the service uses secure hardware environments, layered authorisation and governance controls to protect digital-asset private keys and provide recovery mechanisms.

The move comes as the value of crypto assets held by South Africa’s three largest licensed crypto service providers—LUNO, VALR and OVEX—more than doubled to 25.3 billion Rand ($1.5 billion) by the end of 2024, from less than 10 billion Rand at the start of 2023, according to the South African Reserve Bank.

According to @SAReserveBank , due to their exclusively digital borderless nature, crypto assets can be used to circumvent Exchange Control Regulations. On-chain analysis confirms since January 2019, the top 10 domestically-hosted $BTC wallets have processed ~R63 billion. pic.twitter.com/GgArRVE8wd — BitKE (@BitcoinKE) November 26, 2025

The worldwide custody market is valued at roughly $953.5 billion by 2026 and is projected to grow to as much as $4.38 trillion by 2033.

ABSA’s move also provides infrastructure that could support wider digital-asset services, including tokenisation, digital securities, stablecoins and digital payments. The current offering, however, is focused on institutional custody rather than retail cryptocurrency services.

The development marks a shift in Africa’s digital-asset market, as regulated banks begin providing infrastructure traditionally supplied by specialist crypto firms. The pace of that shift will depend in part on how other African regulators treat bank-run custody and on the regulatory approvals ABSA needs for its stated expansion plans.

Source: BitcoinKE