IBM and Verum Capital collaborate for digital asset custody solutions

IBM and Verum Capital, a Swiss-based blockchain advisory boutique, are collaborating to help businesses accelerate the use of digital assets by scaling and securing blockchain solutions.

According to Research and Markets, the global digital asset management market is growing at 16.5 percent to reach $8.5 billion by 2025. In Switzerland, two banks are now fully licensed to offer blockchain-based financial instruments and traditional banks are increasingly offering crypto services. In the DACH region, more than 50 banks have applied for a license to offer similar services.

More and more, leading financial institutions are bringing traditional investment products onto blockchain. This shift toward decentralized finance is important for the future of the digital economy. By offering blockchain-based financial products, financial institutions can grow business through inclusion. At the individual level, blockchain-based services can support the unbanked but also the micro-investor who can gain access to the rate of return typically reserved for institutional investors with large sums of money. At the organizational level, financial products that are built using the blockchain become affordable and flexible enough to serve the SME segment. Now small businesses can also benefit from bond issuance on blockchain, for example.

Traditional company shares, bonds, loans or non-traditional and non-bankable assets such as artworks, real estate properties, private securities, even gold can be digitized, tokenized, and traded on a variety of platforms. An advantage of tokenizing assets is that it creates a fractional ownership scheme for physical assets that had previously been considered indivisible. The underlying asset could then be offered to a larger number of buyers who have increased liquidity on the secondary market. Tokenization allows the digital economy to become much more efficient, transparent, and liquid, while it also becomes a more inclusive marketplace.

Storing and trading digital assets securely using blockchain is a step forward in unleashing the transformative potential of the digital economy. There are two key success factors for the widespread adoption of digital assets, hypercritical availability and scalability, as well as simultaneous industry leading security. 

Until now, this trade-off has presented a significant obstacle. Users had to choose between availability and security when handling their digital assets. IBM is solving this trade-off for financial services providers through cutting-edge digital asset custody that makes the location of the asset irrelevant (no matter where the asset is actually stored). The technology has incredible potential to improve digital asset availability without sacrificing security.

IBM’s digital asset custody solutions are the basis for the collaboration with Verum Capital. Together, Verum Capital and IBM can offer clients highly secure and scalable digital asset infrastructure solutions, as well as the essential advisory services that will enable them to develop new business opportunities using blockchain.

As the leading blockchain advisory, Verum Capital is joining IBM’s unique ecosystem to ensure that these institutional-grade digital asset services can best be used in the financial services sector.

Since 1977, tens of trillions of dollars of wealth have been secured using hardware security modules (HSMs) invented by IBM. Featuring hardware security modules, IBM LinuxONE servers, for example, enable pervasive encryption of all application data in-flight and at-rest. They run IBM Hyper Protect Virtual Servers, a solution that provides a secure computing environment for highly sensitive data.

Once again, IBM is at the forefront of a technological solution for wealth storage and transaction, and together IBM and Verum Capital are the perfect fit for the positioning of this next generation technology.

Based on our extensive experience working on strategic blockchain projects within the financial sector,  we know how incredibly valuable it is for clients to have the choice to deploy a solution on-premises, as part of a private cloud environment, or as a service, allowing digital asset and blockchain firms to scale with the growing demand.

The essential infrastructure that IBM continues to develop is a very valuable building block for our team of blockchain consultants. When we advise our clients, develop pilot projects, and manage full-scale implementations of blockchain technology, we choose to work with IBM’s infrastructure and products because businesses are very comfortable relying on IBM.