U.S. Banking Industry Ready to Adopt Crypto, Bank of America CEO Says

United States President Donald Trump’s pro-crypto stance has begun to rub off on other financial companies. Brian Moynihan, the CEO of Bank of America (BoA), is the latest to hint at a potential embrace of cryptocurrencies.

In an interview with CNBC at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland, Moynihan explained that U.S. banks will embrace crypto as a payment option if regulators permit it. Bank of America is the second-largest bank in the country, with assets under management (AUM) of over $1.62 trillion as of 2023.

U.S. Banks to Embrace Crypto

U.S. banks currently offer exposure to crypto products like Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) via their institutional trading units. Still, these financial institutions have refrained from providing crypto-focused services to retail investors.

Incorporating crypto into payment services will allow banks to provide digital assets like Bitcoin as payment options with Apple Pay, Visa, Mastercard, debit cards, and others. Explaining how local banks will embrace the digital asset ecosystem, the BoA CEO said:

“If the rules come in and make it a real thing that you can actually do business with, you’ll find that the banking system will come in hard on the transactional side of it.[. . .] This would just be another form of payment.”

Moynihan added that the second-largest bank has “hundreds of patents on blockchain,” giving it an edge once regulators give the green light for banks to begin integrating cryptocurrencies.

Various industry leaders in U.S. banks have previously expressed a pessimistic outlook toward the crypto industry. One example is JP Morgan’s CEO, Jamie Dimon, who stated last week that Bitcoin has “no intrinsic value.”

While Moynihan projects crypto assets as a payment option, he refrains from shedding light on whether the country’s banking industry is ready to invest in assets like BTC as an investment or store of value, similar to players like MicroStrategy. He emphatically stated that it is “really a separate question.”

Not the First

Notably, the U.S. banking sector’s latest nod toward cryptocurrencies is not the first time banks in a country will embrace the digital asset market. In Switzerland, for example, the digital asset bank Sygnum heavily invested in crypto assets like Bitcoin, so much so that it has earned the title of “crypto bank.”

In November 2024, Hong Kong’s ZA Bank debuted crypto trading services for retail users.