Ripple-Backed Custody Study Finds Institutions Want More Than Safe Keys

What happened

A Boston Consulting Group report commissioned by Ripple says banks and investment firms now treat security as a baseline when choosing digital asset custodians. They also judge governance, interoperability and how custody connects with settlement, payments and treasury systems. BCG estimates over 30% of digital assets outside centralised exchanges sit in institutional custody models.

Confirmed

Global impact / market context

Custody providers that only store keys securely may lose business to firms offering approval controls and links to payment and settlement systems. This could push custodians to spend more on integration, lifting costs, while institutions gain assets they can actually deploy, which supports stablecoin and tokenised securities use.

Analyst inference

Ripple sells custody infrastructure, so the report's framing is commercially interested. Still, the question of usability applies across the industry. A shift toward integrated custody could move investor attention from pure security features to providers that connect holdings with treasury, payments and settlement workflows.

Analyst inference

What to watch

1. BCG estimates more than 30% of digital assets outside centralised exchanges are held through institutional custody models, an estimate from commissioned research rather than a directly observed count of every wallet. Confirmed
2. Some firms could choose multiple custodians behind a shared orchestration layer, which means one system coordinating several providers, while others may prefer integrated services from a single provider. Proposed
3. Institutions may accept a technically secure wallet yet fail to deploy assets if approval procedures, reporting or compatibility with existing systems are missing, which would favour custodians investing in operational integration. Analyst inference

Affected assets

• XRP — XRP

Evidence

• newsbtc.com