Investment Bank Cowen Joins Cryptocurrency Craze with Digital Asset Division Launch

US investment bank Cowen announced on Wednesday that it has launched a digital assets division, called Cowen Digital, that will provide full-service trade execution and custody solutions to institutional clients.

The digital asset division will offer cryptocurrency trading and custody solutions for institutional investors via Cowen’s partnership with PolySign’s Standard Custody and Trust Company. Cowen Digital will also offer financing solutions, derivatives and futures, and institutional DeFi and NFT access.

The firm has been building up its digital infrastructure for the previous few months ahead of the launch. In May last year, Cowen partnered with Standard Custody & Trust, a unit of digital asset infrastructure firm PolySign, to provide its customers with easier access to cryptocurrency.

In a statement, Dan Charney, co-president of the bank, said that Cowen Digital has been trading cryptocurrency on behalf of its customers for several months. The division is currently trading 16 cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin, Ether, Solana, USD coin (USDC), Chainlink, Uniswap, Polygon, and Decentraland, and has a client list in the hundreds.

Drew Forman, the Managing Director at Cowen, will lead the new digital unit. “Cowen Digital’s team has had calls with hundreds of potential clients including crypto-native firms, asset allocators, and multi-strategy hedge funds looking to participate in the space. Cowan has quite a large custody and clearing business, so that means they have hundreds if not thousands of institutional clients that trade through them. It’s a captive audience and it’s very early. Zero banks offer this,” Forman elaborated.

Delivering Value to Customers

Founded in 1918, Cowen Inc. is a US multinational investment bank headquartered in New York and with offices worldwide.

In January 2020, Cowen started trading as a member firm of the London Stock Exchange. The move demonstrated Cowen’s strong commitment to serving its customers and offering access to capital markets in the UK and Europe.

Cowen, a diversified financial services firm with over 100 years of history, has strategically built and grown a comprehensive, cross-border financial services platform to include prime brokerage, credit, equities, research, and sector-focused investment banking across Europe and the U.S over the last decade.

Recently, Cowen added seven new senior hires to its international sales and trading team as part of its efforts to deliver value-added capabilities to its clients in order to help them outperform.