Avanti Financial Group, Inc. received formal notice from the Wyoming Division of Banking that Avanti’s application for a bank charter was accepted as complete on July 15, and that its application timeline has been accelerated. As a result, Avanti now expects to open for banking business as early as October 2020.
“Our charter application incorporates truly novel ideas that have received detailed scrutiny from multiple regulators. It is the culmination of an enormous effort by Avanti’s fantastic team — several thousand hours of planning and work with regulators, and hundreds of pages of supporting policies, procedures and documentation,” said Caitlin Long, founder and CEO.
Avanti also announced a new product to modernize US dollar payments, called Avit™, which is also nicknamed ‘the stablecoin disruptor.’ Able to be issued only by a bank, Avit is not a security and will likely be treated as a cash equivalent. It offers legal certainty because it will be issued under existing U.S. commercial laws. Programmable via Avanti’s user-friendly API, Avit is designed for use by institutional traders and corporate treasurers when they prefer a real-time payment settlement solution in US dollars that does not suffer from the delayed settlement and chargeback issues of traditional payment solutions, or the legal, accounting and tax issues of stablecoins. This product builds on Avanti’s digital asset custody platform, executed by a highly experienced and proven engineering team.
“I’m thrilled that the OCC yesterday followed Wyoming in allowing banks to provide custody for digital assets,” Long continued. “Wyoming has been developing its digital asset custody initiative for two years and already has a comprehensive framework and supervisory process in place, which does not exist elsewhere. The OCC and 49 other states do not yet have in place the comprehensive legal structure necessary for enabling digital asset custody without significant legal risk. They also do not have a roadmap for courts to adjudicate disputes involving digital assets and do not provide the certainty in bankruptcy that Wyoming provides for digital asset custodians. Its prudential standards make Wyoming the only jurisdiction in the U.S. where digital asset custody in a bank can truly be executed in a safe and sound manner.”