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Patrick Sells, chief innovation officer at Quontic Bank, is joining New York Digital Investment Group, a provider of investment and technology solutions tied to bitcoin and other digital assets. He will be the fintech startup’s head of bank solutions.
The new job is a natural evolution of the work he’s been doing at Quontic, a New York bank with $1.4 billion of assets, said Sells, who was named American Banker’s Digital Banker of the Year in May.
“The catalyst for why I joined Quontic was a belief that bitcoin and banking should be more symbiotic,” Sells said. “We started the process of working with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and we were one of the leading banks on changing the regulations around what a bank could do with bitcoin.”
At Quontic, Sells and CEO Steven Schnall have given bitcoin to all the bank’s staff and have considered launching their own cryptocurrency. They’ve been developing banking products around bitcoin.
NYDIG has launched a bitcoin rewards engine that can be plugged into any existing credit or checking account. It can be used to pay interest in bitcoin rather than fiat currency.
In his new job, Sells will be creating bitcoin-related products for banks.
“More than 38 million Americans own bitcoin, and that’s despite the fact that the primary financial entities in their lives, banks or credit unions, haven’t made bitcoin accessible,” Sells said.
The OCC’s announcement in July that national banks may hold cryptocurrency assets as part of their custody services was “a great starting point,” Sells said. “NYDIG has proven it can build the infrastructure, and now I hope that given my experience in understanding the core providers and crafting a compliance framework for bitcoin, I can play a role in serving the industry.”
Sells will be working with banks and credit unions to help them launch products like white-labeled bitcoin custody solutions “so consumers and businesses can buy, sell and hold bitcoin through their trusted banking relationships and not just a crypto exchange,” he said. Or, he could “help those same financial institutions to launch innovative products like bitcoin rewards programs, which I would posit are the most powerful kind of rewards program because bitcoin can appreciate in value and be easily liquidated.”
In research Quontic conducted, 22% of Americans who own bitcoin said they would switch their primary checking account for a checking account with bitcoin rewards. Sells said he has spoken with more than 200 bankers in the past year, and about half of them asked about cryptocurrency.
“Today there’s only a handful of banks in this space, but after the OCC announced [that banks can custody digital currency] in late summer, a lot of banks have been asking about bitcoin and what do you do with it?” he said. “Forty million Americans own bitcoin. So it’s here and my belief is banks should play a role in it. People trust banks.”
