Banking giant Barclays has met with UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) in order to talk about how to bring cryptocurrencies like bitcoin ‘into play’, CNBC reported.
The bank's U.K. chief executive Ashok Vaswani told CNBC that Barclays has been in discussions with regulators and fintech companies on how to make bitcoin safe. The talks were in response to a question on how Barclays would support the digital currency.
“We have been talking to a couple of fintechs and have actually gone with the fintechs to the FCA to talk about how we could bring, the equivalent of bitcoin, not necessarily bitcoin, but cryptocurrencies into play,” Vaswani told CNBC during a fintech conference in Copenhagen, Denmark. “Obviously it is a new area, obviously an area we've got to be careful with. We are working our way through it.”
Barclays has been involving in digital currency space. In April 2016, the bank partnered with bitcoin financial services startup Circle in a move to foster the adoption of digital currencies in mainstream financial system.
The recent raise in the price of bitcoin, the first digital currency among all blockchain assets, has towed increasing interest in investors and financial institutions. This is lending legitimacy to the digital currency.
“We are working on it, it is not ready for prime time, we'll get there soon,” Vaswani added.
Barclays has also been trailing various pilots and use cases for blockchain technology that underpins bitcoin digital currency. Last September, the bank partnered with innovative startup firm Wave and executed a global trade transaction using blockchain.
