Altcoin News: A Bank for Cryptocurrency Traders Opened in Puerto Rico

April 2, 2019, by Marko Vidrih on ALTCOIN MAGAZINE

San Juan Mercantile Bank & Trust International (SJMBT), a financial institution serving cryptocurrency traders, opens in Puerto Rico.

In March, the bank received a license as an international financial organization (IFE) from the Financial Institutions Commission (OCIF) of Puerto Rico. The bank, a division of Mercantile Global Holdings (MGH), which also owns the SJMX commodity exchange, has already accepted its first deposit.

SJMBT intends to launch an “institutional level electronic trading platform for digital assets”.

The bank will provide custody and settlement services for both fiat and cryptocurrency traded on the exchange. SJMBT is not insured by the United States Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), but a representative of the institution said that customer deposits would be placed in correspondent banks.

Similarly, customers’ digital assets will be stored in registered vaults, the company said. Correspondent banks and SJMBT vaults are not called.

According to representatives of MGH, joint storage and trade will bring certain benefits. For example, the exchange will take into account customer balances on deposits in the bank when setting trading limits, which will allow the bank to calculate transactions in real time.

“As more liquidity venues onboard with SJMX to trade digital assets, SJMBT will provide critical services, such as real-time settlement and account re-balancing, in support of our customers’ trading activities,” said Nick Varelakis, president and chief operating officer of SJMB&T. “With the advent of new customers, we can start exchange operations through the SJMX Dark Pool platform and through SJMX Blocks, an over-the-counter marketplace (OTC),” follows from the MGH press release.

The MGH team includes veterans of well-known financial companies: Varelakis himself is a former director of JPMorgan Chase for architecture and business transformation, and also a former operating director of Noble Bank in Puerto Rico, who is known in the cryptocurrency space for Tether.

In addition, MGH Bank and Exchange were founded by J. Robert Collins Jr, the former president of the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX, a member of the CME Group) and the founder of the Dubai Mercantile Exchange.

Author: Marko Vidrih