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November 2021
The first bank in Indiana: In November 2021, STAR Financial Bank — headquartered in Fort Wayne, with $2.8 billion in assets and 36 banking centers — began offering its customers the ability to buy, sell, and hold Bitcoin inside the bank's own mobile app. The service ran on the bank's app provider, Alkami Technology, with the New York bitcoin company NYDIG as custodian of the coins. Alkami said STAR was the first bank in Indiana to offer Bitcoin services. Brian Avery, STAR's vice president of technology and digital strategy, told the Indianapolis Business Journal that the bank launched in response to customers who were already buying cryptocurrency elsewhere: "We believe our offering provides them a faster, easier way to perform the transactions they already perform elsewhere," and a convenient, unintimidating way in for customers who did not yet buy. It remains, in the record reached, the city's one documented institutional adoption of cryptocurrency — a community bank deciding that the windfall asset belonged, custodied and regulated, on the same screen as the checking account.
Sources:
- Indianapolis Business Journal, "STAR Bank debuts Bitcoin services for its mobile banking customers" (November 12, 2021) — the launch, the Alkami and NYDIG partnership, the Indiana-first statement, and Avery's comments.