Banking a company whose balance sheet holds digital assets.

Underwriters sort crypto companies by what they do with other people's money. An exchange or custodian holds client assets. A market maker or OTC desk deals continuously. A treasury does neither: it acquired assets for its own account and is not offering services to anyone.

That should be an advantage, and it is, provided the description holds up. If the same directors run an unrelated trading entity, if tokens move between the treasury and other accounts, or if the treasury converts at a frequency that looks like dealing, the reader will classify you as a trading desk and price you accordingly. Keep the treasury's activity genuinely separate, and describe it separately.

This is the question that stops treasury applications, because the answer is usually a wallet address rather than a document. Institutions want the acquisition trail: what was sold, issued, mined or received, when, from which counterparty, at what value, and how the proceeds entered the company's ownership. Tokens received as payment need the underlying invoice. Tokens from a token sale need the subscription documents. Tokens mined need rig, hosting and electricity records.

You do not need a perfect chain of custody. You need a consistent narrative with primary documents behind it, and the same answers every time they are asked.

Name the functions before you apply. A treasury typically needs: inbound fiat for any operational funding, outbound for payroll, contractors and tax, settlement of professional fees such as audit, custody and legal, and a controlled route to convert a planned amount from digital assets to fiat.

That list usually maps to one operating account plus one segregated account for treasury proceeds, not a single account mixing both. Deciding this in advance makes the application shorter, and it prevents the pattern that triggers reviews: irregular large inbound transfers from an exchange landing in the same account that pays salaries.

Institutions ask who holds the assets, how access is controlled, whether a third-party custodian is used, what the signing policy is, and what happens if a key holder leaves. They are not auditing your security; they are testing whether the company could lose the assets and whether a loss would land on them.

A written treasury policy covers this in two pages: where assets are held, the approval threshold for a transfer, who can initiate and who can authorise, how counterparties and venues are selected, and how conversions are scheduled. If you have no policy, write one before the application, not after the first review.

We assess the acquisition history, ownership and residence of the people behind the company, custody arrangements, and the cash flows the account has to support. Then we build the file, including the source-of-funds narrative and treasury policy, and introduce the company to banks and electronic money institutions whose appetite covers digital-asset holdings without requiring a crypto licence.

For cases we accept, successful onboarding with a suitable institution is guaranteed. It applies only to businesses we have reviewed and approved, and it does not reverse a decision another bank has taken or cover a treasury whose acquisition history we cannot evidence.

Three changes raise the odds more than any cover letter. Stop mixing personal and company wallets; commingling is the single most common reason a source-of-funds answer fails. Prepare a dated schedule of acquisitions with the supporting documents attached, so the same answer can be given to every institution. And decide the conversion cadence: a treasury that converts a known amount monthly is far more bankable than one that converts unpredictably, because the flows can be described in advance.