Much excitement has been building since the large American financial services firm Fidelity Investments first announced back in October that they were building a cryptocurrency trading and custody platform. They are now almost ready to launch their Fidelity Digital Assets Exchange.

Fidelity Investments is an investment management company that was established back in 1945 as a mutual fund company. Over the years, they have become synonymous with providing a vast plethora of financial services in regards to wealth management and fund distribution, alongside offering solid investment advice. They are now getting closer to diversifying into the digital assets industry.

Fidelity Digital Assets is Born

Fidelity Investments announced in a blog on Medium on Jan 31 that they are now in the ‘final testing and process refinement periods’ for their new platform, which is being launched by their new company, Fidelity Digital Assets.

At this moment in time, the firm has been working in tandem with a small handful of clients to initially help build the platform and to lay the foundation for a long-term plan to offer crypto solutions to institutional investors.

In the blog, Fidelity discusses the ongoing issues of building the platform and that they are currently in the final testing stages. An excerpt added:

It’s been a challenging and rewarding time here, from critical decisions on product direction, to the intensive work of our development teams. Our operations, risk, and compliance teams are actively working with auditors to refine our policies and procedures, adapt existing operational processes, and to set new benchmarks for this aspect of cryptographic and blockchain-based finance.

Attracting Institutional Investors to Crypto

When the financial investment giants first announced their plans to launch Fidelity Digital Assets and the trading platform back in October 2018, it raised a few eyebrows. Fidelity talked about how they were focusing on attracting institutional investors and how the platform wouldn’t be open to everyone.

Because Fidelity only focused on institutional financial markets, their exposure to the crypto-sphere was almost non-existent up until last year. But as the cryptocurrency sector began to see exponential growth in 2017 and early 2018, they were receiving more and more calls from investors interested in taking a chance on cryptocurrency.

The scope of institutional investors has now widened to the point where creating their own digital asset platform was a natural move for Fidelity. Speaking in the recent blog, Fidelity’s spokesperson said:

Our conversations with a variety of institutions have served to underscore their clear need for a trusted platform provider in order to engage with digital assets in a meaningful way.

Alongside being in the final stages of testing, the investment firm is also working together with crypto regulators to ensure the Fidelity Crypto Assets exchange is fully compliant. We will keep you up to date with the official launch date of the platform when we get more news.