Sibos 2026: Dfns' Jared Klee on Why Banks Can't Run a Fiat Bank and a Digital Assets Bank Side by Side

Quick Summary

As more financial institutions come into the market, they increasingly see digital assets as core to their strategy. That, says Jared Klee of Dfns, means they can't run a fiat bank and then a separate digital assets bank: "they simply need to go run a bank." Speaking at Sibos 2026, he explains why the same applies to capital markets, and why banks operating globally need a platform that can handle different custody rules in every jurisdiction.

Why are digital assets becoming core to bank strategy?

Banks are bringing in new rails and new types of assets, and they need a platform they can run as part of their overall bank. Klee says the same is true in capital markets: rather than running securities in one place and digital securities in another, institutions need to run securities markets that encompass both.

What are institutions looking at?

Klee sees two broad groups coming in:

• Those looking at core infrastructure
• Those looking at business use cases, such as tokenised deposits and tokenised securities with real world assets

What's critical for both, he says, is running businesses that encapsulate digital and traditional assets together. That lets them take control, make it core to who they are, and ride the wave of digitised assets, RWAs and digitised money.

Why does jurisdiction matter for digital asset custody?

Each country often has slightly different requirements for how digital assets are held. Some jurisdictions require assets in cold or offline custody, while others allow them to be hot or always online. Klee's advice is to work with providers that offer an application layer and control plane that can engage with assets wherever they are, while supporting jurisdiction-level requirements under the hood, for example holding 70% of assets offline and 30% online. That needs a liquidity layer in between to handle rebalancing, not just within one region but across multiple regions globally.

FF NEWS TAKE:

Klee's line that banks "simply need to go run a bank" captures where the digital asset conversation has got to. The early model of a separate crypto desk or digital assets subsidiary is giving way to the expectation that tokenised money and securities sit inside the core. His point about jurisdiction-specific custody is the practical catch: a global bank needs one control plane, but dozens of local rules underneath it.