Garanti BBVA Collaborates with Ripple and IBM to Enhance the Performance and Security of Its Growing Digital Platform

Garanti BBVA Kripto aims to provide high performance, security, and customer trust standards of digital assets by establishing strategic collaborations with Ripple through the service received from its subsidiary and IBM, for the safe custody of its crypto asset trading platform, which serves more than 14,000 users.

ISTANBUL--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Garanti BBVA Kripto has collaborated with Ripple and IBM to provide a secure environment for its crypto asset trading platform. Following a successful pilot in 2023, the bank is now rolling out the service to its entire customer base, leveraging technology collaborations to continue to deliver the highest standards of performance, security, and customer trust.

The combined solution from Ripple Custody and IBM enabled the bank to securely build, deploy and manage institutional-grade key management infrastructure with end-to-end security to protect private keys, applications and data.

The advanced security capabilities embedded within this solution include data encryption, isolation of customer environments, embedded Hardware Security Modules with the highest security certification, and a versatile governance framework that removes single points of compromise and helps mitigate the risks associated with malicious actors.

Korcan Abalı, CEO and Member of the Board at Garanti BBVA Kripto said, “We’ve seen clear demand and growing interest from our customers in digital assets. In order to respond to this demand, we launched our Garanti BBVA Digital Assets company in 2023 and currently provide services for BTC, ETH, USDC, AVAX, CHZ, XRP, ARB, and SOL as Garanti BBVA Kripto. The number of our customers who prefer to transfer and store their crypto assets is increasing daily. We will continue to scale by increasing our asset diversity and developing our service infrastructure. Our collaboration with Ripple and IBM gives us the confidence of institutional-grade custody infrastructure, which offers safety, robust governance and compliant processes.”

"Digital assets are increasing day by day, and they need to be managed on a highly secure platform that complies with regulations,” said Işıl Kılınç Gürtuna, IBM Türkiye General Manager. “IBM’s infrastructure capabilities in IBM®LinuxONE will provide Garanti BBVA Kripto with a high level of security standards in a sustainable environment leveraging IBM’s expertise in the Digital Asset Custody domain,” she added.

“We’re thrilled to partner with Garanti BBVA Kripto to bolster the development of Türkiye’s vibrant crypto asset market,” said Aaron Sears, SVP of Global Customer & Partner Success at Ripple. “Secure custody is foundational to unlocking value and addressing the growing demand for new asset classes across the digital economy. We remain committed to supporting our customers around the world to power the digital asset market with our secure and compliant services.”

About Garanti BBVA Kripto

Garanti BBVA Kripto was established in 2023, as a subsidiary of Garanti BBVA, one of Turkey's largest private banks, with the aim of becoming a platform that offers reliable crypto asset services. Our main goal is to ensure that our users have a safe experience when stepping into the crypto world with a customer-oriented approach. Our expert team, with its many years of experience in the blockchain and finance industry, works carefully for a reliable, stable, and regulatory-compliant platform.

About Ripple

Ripple is the leading provider of digital asset infrastructure for financial institutions—delivering simple, compliant, reliable software that unlocks efficiencies, reduces friction, and enhances innovation in global finance. Ripple’s solutions leverage the XRP Ledger and its native digital asset, XRP, which was purpose-built to enable fast, low-cost, highly scalable transactions across developer and financial use cases. With a proven track record working with regulators and policymakers around the world, Ripple’s payments, custody and stablecoin solutions are pioneering the digital asset economy—building credibility and trust in enterprise blockchain. Together with customers, partners and the developer community, we are transforming the way the world tokenizes, stores, exchanges, and moves value.