Standard Chartered is quietly moving to fold its majority-owned crypto custody arm, Zodia Custody, into the bank’s corporate and investment bank (CIB) — a step that underscores the broader consolidation reshaping institutional digital-asset services.
Bloomberg reports that discussions are underway to integrate Zodia’s client-facing custody business into the CIB as soon as this month. The shift would internalize custody services for Standard Chartered’s institutional clients, bringing operations that until now ran in parallel under one regulated unit. Executives view the move as an operational clean-up: merging two overlapping custody infrastructures reduces redundancy, cuts overhead and simplifies the client experience by placing custody under a single, bank-regulated entity.
Importantly, Zodia would not be shuttered. Under the reported plan, the subsidiary would continue as a white-label SaaS provider, offering institutional-grade custody technology to other banks and fintechs that want to brand those services themselves. Today, Zodia supports more than 75 digital assets across seven global offices, employs roughly 150 people, and holds regulatory registrations in the UK, Ireland, Luxembourg and Hong Kong.
The integration aligns with a multi-year digital-asset buildout at Standard Chartered. The bank launched its own custody service in Luxembourg in January 2025 and rolled out spot crypto trading for institutions under the CIB umbrella in July 2025 — services that had been competing with Zodia’s external platform. Since then, the bank has continued to expand across custody, trading, stablecoins and prime brokerage: in November 2025 it partnered with DCS Card Centre on stablecoin-linked credit cards in Singapore, and in January 2026 it moved to establish a crypto prime brokerage within its SC Ventures unit.
The custody restructuring follows recent leadership and organizational shifts at the bank’s crypto businesses. Bloomberg previously reported that Zodia Markets lost CEO Usman Ahmad in March 2026, with Nick Philpott installed as interim head — a change that came less than two weeks before the custody plans surfaced. Zodia itself had been fundraising and expanding its global footprint through late 2024, and Standard Chartered’s January 2025 EU custody license in Luxembourg now appears, in retrospect, to have been groundwork for bringing Zodia’s client-facing operations inside the regulated perimeter of the bank.
Standard Chartered’s move also reflects intensifying competition in institutional custody. Major custodians, including BNY Mellon, State Street and Morgan Stanley — the latter of which designated BNY Mellon as custodian for its MSBT Bitcoin ETF — have all expanded crypto custody offerings in 2026. By folding Zodia’s custody into its CIB, Standard Chartered is accelerating consolidation and positioning itself as a direct competitor to specialist custodians, signaling a willingness to own the institutional digital-asset infrastructure its advisors and corporate clients use rather than keep it at arm’s length.
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