Bank of America CEO Says Banking Industry Ready to ‘Come in Hard’ on Crypto

Bank of America boss Brian Moynihan said Tuesday that U.S. banks would be open to using cryptocurrency for payments if regulators permit it. 

In an interview with CNBC on Tuesday, the CEO of one of America’s biggest banks said that all banks send money digitally nowadays—and that BoA already knows about blockchain technology and has been “studying it for years.” But he added that regulators haven’t been clear on how banks could use a cryptocurrency.

“If the rules come in and make it a real thing that you can actually do business with,” he said, “you’ll find that the banking system will come in hard on the transactional side of it,”

Moynihan’s comments come just as Wall Street’s top regulator, the Securities and Exchange Commission, announced a new crypto task force that will create “a sensible regulatory path” for the industry.

“If it’s a stablecoin-type of dollar-backed [crypto], like the money market fund… and our consumers actually want to use it, we think there’s value there,” he said at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “That’s just another way money moves.”

A stablecoin is a type of digital token backed by another asset—usually the U.S. dollar—that doesn’t experience the same volatile price movements as cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin or Ethereum. Law makers in the U.S. have honed in on that part of the cryptosphere in recent years, with former regulators previously telling Decrypt that the Biden Administration was keen on gaining better control over the sphere.

Moynihan was responding to questions about President Donald Trump’s crypto embrace: the new commander in chief said during his campaign that he’d help the industry, and released a Solana meme coin on Friday ahead of his inauguration.

Moynihan wouldn’t comment on the investment side of cryptocurrency, though. 

Other top American bank chiefs have also been reluctant to praise Bitcoin, but have at the same time acknowledged the use cases of crypto. 

JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon has repeatedly said the biggest cryptocurrency is useless and like a “pet rock,” but that blockchain technology was helpful. Earlier this month, the boss of the world’s biggest bank said that Bitcoin was used heavily by “sex traffickers [and] by money launderers,” but that he could see a digital currency being used in the U.S. 

“I’m not against crypto, but Bitcoin has no intrinsic value,” he said in an interview with CBS News. 

Edited by Andrew Hayward