FAB Completes Digital Asset Transfers With Komainu to Support Institutional Financing

The transfers were settled immediately. According to the report, this capability lets clients pledge digital asset portfolios as collateral in financing deals, which is standard practice in institutional lending. That includes repurchase agreements secured against digital assets.

FAB said digital asset financing is already available to its institutional clients and that it is preparing to carry out its first transactions.

How the Arrangement Works

The transfers put into practice a collaboration between FAB's global markets division and Komainu. Komainu's regulated custody services are linked to the bank's existing infrastructure. According to the report, the exercise shows the bank can move digital assets into and out of custody and that its systems are ready for institutional digital asset financing.

In a repurchase transaction, a borrower sells assets to a lender and agrees to buy them back later at a set price. This gives the lender collateral it can take if the borrower defaults. To offer this against digital assets, a bank must be able to move the assets between custody accounts quickly and with legal certainty. Completing live transfers addresses that operational requirement.

Part of a Wider Push

This is FAB's latest step in digital assets. The bank has recently carried out live tokenised deposit transactions with Citi over the Swift ledger platform. It also issued what it describes as the first natively digital green bond in the Middle East and North Africa, through Euroclear's D-FMI digital financial market infrastructure.

The bank presents these projects as a way to link traditional financial markets with digital assets and to build practical products for institutional clients. For Gulf institutions holding crypto and tokenised assets, financing against those holdings from the UAE's largest bank would let them raise cash without selling. FAB has not said when its first financing deal will close, or what size or pricing it expects for the product.