Liechtenstein’s Bank Frik To Launch Trading Platform Subsidiary

By Rishma Banerjee

Liechtenstein has been in the news almost regularly now, for their recent crypto related developments. Theirs have been a crypto-friendly country, where the focus has been to make it crypto transactions and related businesses easier for people to access and use.

We recently learned that a post office there will be selling bitcoins, but now it has been reported, that Liechtenstein-based Bank Frick is launching an institutional cryptocurrency trading platform subsidiary, DLT Markets. The bank has announced that DLT Markets will be providing institutional investors “with fully regulated and secure multi-exchange access to the digital token asset class.”

Edi Wögerer, who is the CEO of Bank Frick, declared:

“With our spin-off, we are offering institutional clients a unique combination of a fintech company and a bank regulated by the EU[.]”

Roger Wurzel, who previously had worked in business development at the bank, has been appointed as the CEO of this new subsidiary initiative. The bank’s former blockchain project developer and co-founder of cloud-based accounting company Styxchange will be responsible for business development at DLT Markets.

As per press release, the Bank Frick is based in Balzers and was founded in 1998. A majority of its shares are owned by the Kuno Frick Family Foundation. Another press release from April 2018 notes that while the bank had reported a net profit of 6.3 million Swiss francs (about $6.3 million) in 2017 their profits since have nearly double and a 3.2 million francs (about $3.2 million) were registered in the previous year. The same report also says that the bank had managed as much as 3.81 billion francs (about $3.8 billion) in client funds at the time of publication.

DLT Markets is not the bank’s first foray into the crypto sphere. Bank Frick, steeped into the world of crypto when they began offering “direct investment” in and cold storage of five major cryptocurrencies.