Kraken parent Payward explores becoming a 'full bank' outside the US

Payward, the parent company of the crypto exchange Kraken, is looking into ways to offer banking services outside of the U.S. as it expands beyond crypto trading into asset management and other financial infrastructure services.

"We are looking into actually becoming a full bank in some of our other geographies, likely not the U.S. immediately," Payward and Kraken co-CEO Dave Ripley told The Block at Wyoming Blockchain Symposium 2026.

Ripley didn't specify which jurisdictions or banking licenses Payward is pursuing, but he described trading, banking and asset management as the three product areas that the firm is honing in on.

"What is banking? It’s payments and money movement. It’s lending. It’s yield. It’s custody," Ripley said. "We do all four of those things."

Payward already operates Kraken Financial, a Wyoming-chartered Special Purpose Depository Institution that launched in March 2024 and is "authorized to offer digital asset custody and deposit accounts for institutions."

However, Kraken Financial still cannot lend customers' fiat and is not insured by the FDIC, as a conventional bank can. It scored a big victory earlier this year when it received a limited-purpose "skinny" Federal Reserve master account, which allowed it to connect to parts of the central bank's payment system, the first of its kind for a crypto company.

Ripley said securing conventional banking status elsewhere could allow Payward to make more of its financial products available to more customers.

"It’ll just allow us to offer more of those to more users," he said.

The Block also sat down with Payward Chief Commercial Officer Mark Greenberg, who briefly touched on other examples of services it could potentially offer down the line.

"If they want to come to us and get a mortgage at some point, hopefully we can offer those kinds of services," Greenberg said.