PNC Financial Services Group has opened direct Bitcoin trading for its richest clients through a new system built with Coinbase, according to a press release sent out on Tuesday.
The US bank switched on the feature months after the two firms announced their partnership in July. The setup lets private-bank customers place Bitcoin trades inside their investment accounts, using money already sitting in their PNC checking balances.
The service is only for PNC’s high-net-worth clients and family offices. It runs inside their investment portals, with PNC staying in control of the customer relationship while Coinbase handles the back-end.
The trades don’t require users to leave the bank’s ecosystem, and no public exchange interface is involved.
Coinbase Handles Trading While PNC Manages Client Relationships
Brett Tejpaul, the co-chief executive of Coinbase Institutional, stated that Coinbase provides the broker tools and tech systems enabling PNC customers to buy any amount of Bitcoin directly from within the bank’s platform.
Brett compared the company’s institutional shift to how Amazon built AWS to power internet infrastructure from the background.
PNC supports Coinbase with treasury management and banking services as part of the partnership. Both sides benefit from the arrangement, but PNC maintains the front-end customer interaction, a crucial aspect as the bank aims to prevent fintech firms from attracting wealthy clients away.
Bill Demchak, PNC’s chief executive, commented on this strategy, saying, "Fintech broadly wants to pick off parts of our relationship with product offerings that effectively make banking, in the extreme, just back office, and there’s no reason they should be able to do that."
PNC has previously engaged with the crypto space, but only through Bitcoin and Ether Exchange-Traded Funds (ETFs), which offered clients exposure without direct trading capabilities. Amanda Agati, the bank’s chief investment officer, indicated that while the bank is in the early stages of its crypto initiatives, it seeks to retain clients by providing them with investment options within the bank’s own ecosystem.
Amanda further explained, “It is not so much about our client base being big investors today, but they’re looking to us for an understanding of what these things are, how it works, and does it make sense in the longer term.”
PNC plans to extend Bitcoin trading to institutional clients, including nonprofits, endowments, and foundations, in the upcoming year. This expansion will move the service into a broader institutional market, where regulated investors manage substantial capital pools.
PNC Prepares for Stablecoin Developments Amid Evolving Regulatory Landscape
Leading U.S. bank executives have been closely monitoring the stablecoin sector. Figures like Jamie Dimon, Brian Moynihan, and Jane Fraser have all expressed concerns that stablecoins could potentially diminish banks' oversight of payment systems.
Their respective institutions have indicated that they are developing strategies to address these potential impacts as Washington D.C. establishes regulations for the sector. President Donald Trump recently signed the first federal stablecoin legislation into law, providing greater regulatory clarity for cryptocurrencies in the United States.
Bill Demchak anticipates that any future stablecoin initiative will likely emerge from a banking consortium rather than a single bank operating independently. He affirmed that PNC "would clearly be part of that" during a recent earnings call.
PNC's internal efforts in the payments domain are spearheaded by Emma Loftus, who joined the bank in 2019 after leading global payments at JPMorgan. Emma has dedicated over a decade to researching the potential applications of crypto and blockchain as alternative payment solutions. She believes that shifts in U.S. regulatory frameworks will foster increased adoption, particularly for payment transactions.