ABSA Group has become the first African bank to offer institutional digital-asset custody moving into a market that is gaining traction as traditional financial institutions expand into cryptocurrencies and tokenised assets.

The Johannesburg-based lender said its ABSA Digital Asset Custody service is initially available to institutional clients in South Africa, including

  • asset managers,

  • non-bank financial institutions, and

  • corporates.

The service provides the

  • safekeeping,

  • administration, and

  • transfer

of digital assets within a regulated banking environment.

The new service comes exactly one year after Ripple announced a strategic partnership with ABSA bank to provide digital asset custody to the bank’s customers in South Africa.

 

PRESS RELEASE | Ripple Brings Institutional Digital Asset Custody to South Africa in Partnership with One of Africa’s Leading Financial Institutions

 

The platform currently supports Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP Ledger and USDC, with ABSA planning to add other assets as demand develops. Bitcoin is currently the pre-dominant asset held in custody, said Rob Downes, Head of Digital Assets at ABSA’s Corporate and Investment Banking Unit.

 

 

ABSA said it received regulatory approval in South Africa for the service and plans to extend it to additional client segments and other African markets subject to regulatory approvals.

 

The bank’s custody infrastructure was developed with digital-asset technology provider, Ripple.

 

ABSA said the service uses secure hardware environments, layered authorisation, and governance controls to protect digital-asset private keys and provide recovery mechanisms.

The move comes as the value of crypto assets held by South Africa’s 3 largest licensed crypto service providers:

  • LUNO,

  • VALR, and

  • OVEX

more than doubled to 25.3 billion Rand ($1.5 billion) by the end of 2024 from less than 10 billion Rand at the start of 2023, according to the South African Reserve Bank.

 

According to @SAReserveBank, due to their exclusively digital borderless nature, crypto assets can be used to circumvent Exchange Control Regulations.

On-chain analysis confirms since January 2019, the top 10 domestically-hosted $BTC wallets have processed ~R63 billion. pic.twitter.com/GgArRVE8wd

— BitKE (@BitcoinKE) November 26, 2025

The worldwide custody market is valued at roughly $953.5 billion by 2026, and is projected to grow to as much as $4.38 trillion by 2033.

 

REGULATION | Europe Now Has Over 300 MiCA-Approved Crypto Firms – Custody Services Dominate at ~70%

 

ABSA’s move also gives the bank infrastructure that could support wider digital-asset services, including

  • tokenisation,

  • digital securities,

  • stablecoins, and

  • digital payments,

although the current offering is focused on institutional custody rather than retail cryptocurrency services.

The development marks a shift in the African digital-asset market with regulated banks beginning to provide infrastructure traditionally supplied by specialist crypto firms.

 

 

INSTITUTIONAL | South African Stablecoin, ZARU, Adds ABSA as Second Major Banking Partner

 

 

 

 

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