FundBank Group changed its name to IRACE Digital on 29 June and announced a shift into digital assets. The bank, which serves the asset management industry, said that if regulators approve it will combine traditional banking services with digital asset services, such as holding and trading cryptocurrencies.
As part of the shift, new global CEO John Cronin has been hired from cryptocurrency custody firm Zodia Custody, which was recently subject to an acquisition bid from Standard Chartered. Another element of the move is “a strategic partnership” that will see IRACE service the customers of Tenet, a Cayman-based tech-focused bank that was founded in 2023.
The move is part of a bet by IRACE that its institutional clients will increasingly want digital asset services. “Institutional clients today are forced to stitch together banking, custody, payments, liquidity and execution across multiple providers, each with its own controls, reporting and operational risk,” said Cronin.
“IRACE is being built to unify that stack into a single institutional platform – one operating model, one governance framework, one set of controls – which will support fiat, stablecoins, and both traditional and digital assets.”
Several other former Zodia executives, including Jo Lee, Niamh Byrne and Jennifer Fisher, have also joined the company in senior leadership roles.
IRACE, which can trace its roots back to DMS Bank and Trust, has offices in Cayman, the US and the EU. But in a 29 June interview with the Compass, Cronin explained that Cayman was “at the heart” of the digital asset strategy.
“Cayman has been for a long while, the leading jurisdiction for funds, for managers, for institutional financial services,” said Cronin. “But it’s also been the early mover in digital assets and moved before many other jurisdictions did. And this is what’s led to the concentration of crypto funds, of foundations, of tokenisation activity.”
“Cayman has funds already, it has foundations, it’s got digital asset activity. The next step for us is having banking and custody infrastructure here to support that market properly.”
Global trends and regulation
The rebrand to IRACE, which stands for Institutional Real Asset Custody and Exchange, mirrors a wider trend in the banking industry, with large institutional names increasingly looking to offer digital asset services to customers. That has accelerated following digital asset regulation in the US, such as the 2025 GENIUS Act and the proposed CLARITY Act, which is currently before the US Senate.
Cronin noted that in the Biden administration “Operation Choke Point 2.0” and accompanying regulation “knocked all the large traditional custodians out of crypto and digital asset custody. You had a big retrenchment from the traditional players, the big, large banks in this space.” But that has changed with Donald Trump, “with a focus on getting the digital asset industry back onshore in the US”.
As a result, the global digital asset industry now has a much more standardised regulatory framework, which helps financial institutions feel more comfortable. IRACE is currently working towards regulatory digital asset approval in the US, EU and Cayman, which it expects to receive later this year.
“The [regulatory] standards are very, very similar and regulators are very coordinated across the globe on these,” said Cronin. He added that the questions being asked by the Cayman Islands Monetary Authority for IRACE to get a Virtual Asset Service Provider licence are very similar to those asked by US and EU regulators.
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