At Hong Kong Fintech Week on Monday, JPMorgan Chase President and Chief Operating Officer Daniel Pinto and Standard Chartered Group Chief Executive Bill Winters disagreed on the importance of Bitcoin and the broader crypto business.
According to Pinto, ““Bitcoin for us, I’d say the best word to describe it is ‘irrelevant,’ it’s not good or bad,” They have few clients interested in the sector, he continued.
In addition, Pinto emphasized the bank’s capacity to use “blockchain through the JP Morgan Coin” to assist businesses in “optimizing their liquidity,” contending that institutional banks should be in charge of managing “digital securities, stable currencies, and CBDCs.”
Winters disagreed with Pinto’s take on Bitcoin’s potential, saying: “I agree with Danny on the overall scheme of things, but there is an institutional application for cryptocurrencies, and that overwhelmingly is in Bitcoin and Ether. It’s small, but it’s not irrelevant.”
Winters pointed out the limitations of cryptocurrencies, stating that tokenized assets have never been “fit as part of the financial infrastructure” but have instead only served as another component of investors’ portfolios.
Pinto’s remarks on cryptocurrencies are the most recent in a string of critical remarks from JP Morgan about the legitimacy of the sector, despite the bank’s plans to launch a full-fledged blockchain division, Onyx, in 2020 and hire Aaron Lovine, a former Celsius executive, as executive director of regulatory policy for digital assets last week.
