Citi to Launch Bitcoin Custody for Institutions Before Year-End

Citi has confirmed it will go live with native Bitcoin custody for institutional clients before the end of 2026, placing the $2.78 trillion bank squarely in a competitive field of large custodians now building out digital asset infrastructure.

The bank unveiled Custody+ – a modular custody suite covering eight capabilities across three buckets: speed and certainty, intelligence, and control – on August 18. Bitcoin custody sits inside the infrastructure bucket alongside a white-label platform that lets other institutions plug into Citi's back office. The Bitcoin service will launch "starting with the custody of Bitcoin," according to an official release issued from London by Citi's Investor Services division.

The key differentiator Citi is pitching: clients access traditional and crypto custody capabilities within the same framework — the same account structure, reporting stack, and risk and compliance workflows used for equities and bonds. Bitcoin holdings will not live in a separate wallet product bolted on the side.

"Institutional investors no longer want to manage digital assets in isolation from their traditional book-of-record," Amit Agarwal, Head of Custody at Citi, said in the release. "Custody+ is the product of a multi-year commitment to building infrastructure that matches the speed of our clients' strategies."

Three years in the making

Citi first flagged a 2026 target for crypto custody in an October 2025 interview with CNBC, when Biswarup Chatterjee, the bank's global head of partnerships and innovation in services, said development had been underway for two to three years. The initial focus was on custody for stablecoin reserves and crypto ETF underlyings.

Chris Cox, Head of Investor Services at Citi, said the business invests more than $2 billion annually in its platform strategy. "Custody+ is a clear example of this investment as we build infrastructure to eliminate latency and drag for institutional investor clients," Cox said.

The launch coincides with the completion of the U.S. rollout of Citi's patented Single Event Processing (SEP) technology. The bank said voluntary corporate action processing times in the U.S. have been reduced by up to 92%, with 96% of U.S. voluntary events now processed in under two hours. More than 80% of total event volume runs in real time.

The wider Custody+ suite

Beyond Bitcoin, the eight capabilities Citi is rolling out include: real-time asset servicing, instant settlements at central securities depositories, on-demand FX with automated hedging, real-time cash and liquidity management, an AI-driven tax documentation workflow — which Citi says has cut processing times by up to 70% — an enhanced AI-powered Market Guide platform available in over 100 locations, and cloud and API-based data access for client-side analytics and AI models.

Custody+ also folds in Citi Token Services (CTS), the bank's private permissioned blockchain infrastructure live since 2024 that enables near-instantaneous movement of tokenized deposits on a 24/7 basis across select Citi markets. CTS has been progressively integrated with 24/7 USD Clearing — connected in September 2025 — and expanded to Euro settlement out of Dublin in November 2025. Siam Commercial Bank onboarded in July 2026 as the first external bank live on the combined 24/7 USD Clearing and CTS setup.

Citi is also part of broader interbank digital asset infrastructure work, having joined the 17-bank Swift blockchain ledger pilot and participating in the tokenized deposit network that JPMorgan, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Citi are building through The Clearing House.

A crowded institutional custody field

Citi's move lands into a segment that has filled in rapidly among large custodian banks.

BNY Mellon — the largest custodian globally with approximately $59 trillion in client assets — received a SAB 121 variance in 2024 and has since built out an institutional digital asset custody platform, most recently extending it to hold, mint, and redeem Circle's USDC. U.S. Bank resumed its Bitcoin custody service in September 2025 with NYDIG as sub-custodian, adding Bitcoin ETFs to the offering for the first time. State Street has flagged plans to enter crypto custody in 2026. Standard Chartered is in the process of fully absorbing its Zodia Custody unit in an internalization deal.

The competitive question for Citi will be whether its advantage — the depth of its global securities services footprint across more than 100 markets, and the integration pitch of unified reporting across asset classes — is sufficient to win mandates from institutions that have already gone with a competitor or a dedicated crypto custodian. Custody+ addresses the fragmentation problem that institutions have cited as a barrier to deeper crypto engagement, but it is a similar pitch to what BNY Mellon and others are making.