Report: Russian Bank Starts Cross-Border Crypto Payments

One of Russia’s biggest banks is apparently going to start using crypto assets in a new system for making payments across borders.

A recent article in the Russian newspaper Vedomosti says that a Rosbank representative said that the bank is already testing transactions with both private and business accounts.

Even though it’s not clear which digital assets the bank will support for cross-border payments, the Russian fintech group B-crypto will be in charge of the technical parts of the new protocol.

A report from the RBC Group says that customers must go through a KYC (know-your-customer) process with both the bank and B-crypto before they can use the service.

In the report, Alexey Voylukov, the vice president of the Association of Banks of Russia, says that crypto-focused cross-border payments are usually given by smaller banks and that large institutions have not yet adopted such services.

Vladimir Chistyukhin, the First Deputy Chairman of the Bank of Russia, says that cross-border payments aren’t going to be a full-time way to pay for things around the world.

The US Department of the Treasury put sanctions on Rosbank and Vladimir Potanin, who is thought to be Russia’s richest man and owns the bank, at the end of last year. This was done to make it harder for Moscow to pay for its war against Ukraine.

In the RBC Group story, senior partner at Emet Law Firm and attorney Eduard Davydov says that the cross-border payment system could be a way for Rosbank to get around the sanctions that have been put on it.