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Ripple (XRP) says new BCG research finds institutional custody is shifting from safekeeping toward governance, interoperability and integration.
Ripple (XRP) said on Wednesday that newly commissioned Boston Consulting Group research frames digital asset custody as more than safekeeping, arguing that governance, interoperability and integration are becoming central selection criteria for institutions. The company’s overview of the report, published Oct. 21, 2026, said the shift matters because stablecoins, tokenized assets and blockchain-based payments are moving beyond pilots and into operational use.
Evidence and context
According to Ripple’s summary of the BCG report, more than 30% of digital assets, excluding holdings on centralized exchanges, are now held through institutional custody models, and that share continues to grow. The report, titled Beyond Safekeeping: Custody as the Operating Layer Beneath Digital Finance, says regulatory clarity from frameworks such as MiCA in Europe and the GENIUS Act in the United States is making safekeeping and key management baseline requirements rather than differentiators.
The research, as described by Ripple, says institutions are increasingly evaluating custody providers on enterprise-grade governance and policy controls, interoperability across networks and integration with existing financial infrastructure. It also highlights rising bot and AI activity as a factor increasing the importance of governance and approval controls alongside cryptography. On that basis, the report characterizes custody as an operating layer that allows institutions to govern, move and use assets across financial workflows, rather than merely hold them.
Ripple said the report finds custody models are diversifying. It cited Wallet-as-a-Service gaining traction among retail- and payments-focused fintechs, while large banks are increasingly licensing self-custody technology and building client products on top of it. The overview also described a one-stop-shop model in which providers combine custody, settlement assets, payment rails, treasury and execution under one offering. Ripple said BCG sees combining multiple custodians behind a common orchestration layer as becoming a market standard, making interoperability and orchestration important considerations.
The report also links custody to a wider set of use cases, including tokenization, stablecoin issuance, payments, treasury, lending and collateral management. Ripple said BCG estimates that a regional bank with a $200 billion to $300 billion balance sheet could improve its P&L by up to $100 million by combining digital asset use cases with the right custody decisions. The source material does not provide the underlying assumptions behind that estimate.
The October 2026 overview builds on earlier BCG work on digital asset controls, but the context differs. BCG’s May 29, 2024 framework with DTCC, Clearstream and Euroclear focused on digital asset securities rather than cryptocurrencies, and included six principles, more than 30 risks and more than 50 controls. Ripple’s 2026 summary is a separate research effort focused on institutional digital asset custody.
Ripple’s post presents custody as strategically important for institutions considering how quickly they can launch digital finance services. It also says BCG expects the custody market to consolidate around providers that vertically integrate, aggregate networks or embed modular infrastructure. The timing of any broader market validation of those trends is not stated in the source material.
