Brian Moynihan, CEO of Bank of America, stated on Tuesday that if regulators permit it, the U.S banking sector will accept cryptocurrency as a form of payment.
Given President Donald Trump’s fervor for digital currencies, a journalist questioned the president of the second-largest U.S. bank by assets on how the industry’s approach to crypto could change.
“If the rules come in and make it a real thing that you can actually do business with, you’ll find that the banking system will come in hard on the transactional side of it,” Moynihan said in an interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
Although their institutional trading and wealth management divisions have taken part in markets for bitcoin ETFs, American banks have generally refrained from allowing their clients to utilize cryptocurrency for retail transactions.
“If you go down the street here and you go in and buy lunch, right, if you can pay with Visa,Mastercard,a debit card, Apple Pay, etc., this would just be another form of payment,” Moynihan said. “We have hundreds of patents on blockchain already, we know how to enter the field”.
The veteran CEO of Bank of America stated that the concept of crypto currencies like bitcoin as a store of wealth or an investment is “really a separate question”.
