Tulsa, Okla.-based commercial and retail community bank Vast Bank is offering crypto banking as a service to banks looking to offer crypto services without implementing their own technology.

Vast rolled out its crypto banking service in its new app in late August. The service links with customers’ checking accounts and allows them to buy, sell and hold 12 cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin [BTC], Bitcoin Cash [BCH], Ethereum [ETH] and Litecoin [LTC], among others.

“We looked at the currencies available and put them through a rigorous vetting process,” Stephen Taylor, chief information officer at Vast, told Bank Automation News. “Adding new coins is an ongoing focus for us.”

Vast began several years ago to implement systems, applications and products, using core provider SAP, Taylor said. “Our executive team and ownership have been working on these forward-looking new banking features for years to be ahead of the industry changes we see happening,” he added.

According to SAP, Vast Bank uses the S/4HANA Finance solution and the HANA platform ― delivering “an open platform that gives Vast the potential to form partnerships with other financial services providers.”

Taylor noted that Vast has “other supporting technologies and implementation partners,” including Axxiome as its SAP implementation partner. “We leveraged and extended the multicurrency, digital asset management and multitenancy capabilities of our banking core to directly support cryptocurrencies,” he told BAN.

For crypto trading, Vast has partnered with cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase. “We developed our own direct crypto custody management system and real-time cryptocurrency exchange integration with Coinbase. We are leveraging many advanced technologies, including web application firewalls, containers and auto-scaling solutions,” Taylor said, adding that the bank additionally tapped digital platform and product designer EPAM Systems as its Coinbase implementation partner.

The real-time platform was necessary to support trading cryptocurrencies, which can fluctuate rapidly in value. “All of our trades are made in real time, based on dedicated market pricing feeds to determine the accurate and fair market price,” Taylor told BAN. “When a customer places an order, we provide the price summary estimate to the customer for them to make the determination if they want to execute the order.”

Since laying this groundwork, the bank is now ready to partner with other banks to offer crypto trading, though Taylor did not name any participating banks. “We have built our system to natively support offering the services to other banks and institutions,” he said. “We leverage the multitenant capabilities in our technology platform to provide the crypto banking as a service.”

The concept of “crypto as a service” is a fairly recent approach, and most such offerings are through cloud software providers.

While Zumo’s ZumoKit is designed to offer fintechs and financial institutions (FIs) a way to add on crypto trading services and Bitstamp has a similar crypto-as-a-service offering for FIs, for example, Vast is a standout among community banks in bringing such an offering to market.

“Banks of all sizes are increasingly interested in offering crypto products and services, and realizing they can’t build it themselves,” said Diogo Monica, co-founder and president of digital asset platform provider Anchorage Digital, which specializes in safeguarding cryptocurrencies. Anchorage is seeing “a great deal of interest” from banks as well as fintechs and other FIs looking to offer crypto products to customers, he said, pointing to the $547.9 billion US Bank‘s launch yesterday of Bitcoin custody services for institutional investment managers.

Monica said such developments signal “another step forward in making crypto part of the traditional financial system.”

Vast Bank charges a flat 1% fee to buy and sell on its crypto banking platform. Going forward, the bank plans a “crypto concierge” offering to provide personalized service for individuals and institutions looking to invest more than $100,000 in cryptocurrencies.

Also on the horizon for Vast customers could be allowing them to transfer they crypto they already own into their bank account. “We are working hard to add this feature, as well as others,” Taylor said. “We want to ensure all features are safe, sound and secure.”