Why Digital Asset Accounts Became a Retention Question for Neobanks
Neobanks won their customers by being faster than incumbents. That advantage now faces pressure from a different direction. A customer who wants to hold stablecoins, buy digital assets, or send money abroad on rails that settle at the weekend will open a second app to do it. Every one of those second apps is a relationship you no longer own end to end.
Fireblocks bridges traditional finance and digital assets so institutions can hold, move, manage and issue value on one platform. More than 2,400 enterprises run their digital asset operations on Fireblocks across 150+ blockchains, and the platform has secured over $14T in digital asset transactions to date. This guide is for neobank teams selecting the infrastructure to launch digital asset accounts inside a regulated perimeter.
For neobanks, the decisions that carry the most weight cluster around three areas:
- Custody model and regulatory perimeter: Whether you hold customer assets directly, a licensed entity holds them, or the customer holds their own, and what each choice does to your licence obligations
- Retail experience: What a customer sees when they hold or move digital assets, and how much crypto mechanics reach them before they abandon the flow
- Integration and resilience: How the platform connects to your existing ledger, KYC stack and reporting, and what your regulator expects you to evidence about a third-party provider
Vendor selection carries a complication specific to this segment. Several providers offering digital asset infrastructure are consumer-facing brands in their own right. Routing your customers’ digital asset activity through a company that also sells accounts to those same customers is a commercial decision as much as a technical one, and it is worth resolving before the integration work starts. Neobanks have re-platformed for exactly this reason.
Teams evaluating digital assets across a wider set of institutional needs, including institutional custody and tokenized securities, may also want the Fireblocks Buyer’s Guide for Banks & Financial Institutions.
Where Fireblocks Excels in Digital Asset Infrastructure for Neobanks
Launch Digital Asset Accounts Without Widening Your Regulatory Perimeter
The custody question determines almost everything downstream. It sets which licenses you need, which balances appear on your balance sheet, what your auditors test, and what you can offer which customer segment. Most neobanks discover this after selecting a provider that supports only one model.
Fireblocks supports three, on one platform. You can take direct custody of customer assets through Wallets-as-a-Service, place assets with a licensed entity through qualified custody, or offer non-custodial embedded wallets where the customer holds their own keys. That means the custody model becomes a product decision you make per segment, rather than a constraint your vendor sets for you. A retail savings feature and a business stablecoin account can sit on different models without a second integration.
Fireblocks for Neobanks
- Fireblocks Embedded Wallets, powered by Dynamic, let customers hold their own assets through familiar social login, with no complexity and TSS-MPC security
- Wallets-as-a-Service for creating and securing MPC wallets at scale where you take direct custody
- Qualified custody through a licensed Fireblocks entity, for products where a regulated custodian is the cleaner structure
- Third-party custodians connected over the Fireblocks Network, held in your own Fireblocks instance, so a custodial product can move to direct wallets without re-integrating
- Stablecoin infrastructure for configuring payment account structures, holding balances securely and moving value across borders
- The Fireblocks Network for Payments connects on and off-ramps, local payment rails and liquidity providers, so customer payouts reach destination currency
- Earn generates yield on idle stablecoin balances through onchain lending, which turns a held balance into a revenue line
- Policy Engine enforces limits, whitelists and approval quorums at the transaction layer, below your application code
- Compliance built into the transaction path through integrated screening, Travel Rule and wallet verification
- The Fireblocks COR compliance package supports operational resilience obligations, including the third-party provider evidence DORA requires
- Financial data for reconciliation and audit-ready reporting into the finance systems you already run
- Flexible deployment options for institutions with data residency or hosting requirements
Digital Asset Use Cases for Neobanks
- Retail buying, selling and holding of digital assets inside your existing app
- Stablecoin accounts for consumer savings or business balances, with stablecoin payments in and out
- Cross-border payments and remittances that settle outside banking hours and outside correspondent banking timelines
- Yield products on stablecoin balances, offered to retail or business customers
- Treasury management for your own digital asset positions, automated rather than desk-operated
- Staking and rewards features for customers holding supported assets
- Tokenized savings, loyalty or deposit products managed across the full asset lifecycle
Decision-Making Framework: Evaluating Digital Asset Infrastructure for Neobanks
Work through these categories with product, compliance and engineering in the room together. A neobank launching a retail crypto feature in one market and a neobank building stablecoin business accounts across several will weigh them very differently, but both should be able to answer every row.
| Category | What to Evaluate | Why It Matters for Neobanks |
| Custody model flexibility | Support for direct custody, qualified custody and non-custodial wallets on one platform, and whether switching between them means a new integration | The custody model drives your licence obligations and your balance sheet treatment. Committing to one model early forces a re-platform when the next product needs a different one |
| Regulatory perimeter | Which entity holds customer assets, what licences that requires in your markets, and whether the provider operates regulated entities of its own | Compliance teams are asked to defend this structure to a regulator, the answer needs to be documented |
| Retail wallet experience | Onboarding through familiar login methods and how much of the interface you control | Wallet creation is where retail funnels break. The experience is your product, and a templated or provider-branded flow dilutes it |
| Commercial alignment of the provider | Whether the provider also operates a consumer-facing brand competing for the same customers | Infrastructure should not be supplied by a company acquiring your depositors |
| Security architecture | Which key management models the provider supports, including MPC, HSM and external KMS, plus breach isolation, independent recovery paths, and where policy is enforced | Key management is where your security posture meets your licence obligations. The question is whether the provider supports the model your regulator, your asset coverage and your engineering team actually require, rather than one architecture applied to every product |
| Compliance and governance | AML and KYC integration, Travel Rule support, sanctions screening, and coverage across your licensed markets | Compliance requiring separate integrations creates operational seams that examiners find and your team has to staff |
| Operational resilience | Certifications, uptime commitments, incident history, and the third-party evidence pack the provider can supply | Resilience regimes such as DORA place the obligation on you, and you can only meet it with what your provider gives you |
| Integration with existing systems | API completeness, reconciliation output, and how digital asset balances land in the ledger and reporting you already run | A digital asset product that finance reconciles by hand does not survive contact with month-end |
| Time to launch | Sandbox access, documented flows, and how quickly a new asset or market goes live | Speed is the reason a neobank buys rather than builds |
| Commercial model | How pricing behaves as wallet count, balances and transaction volume grow | Per-wallet and basis-point pricing that looks cheap at launch can become the largest line item once the feature succeeds |
Why Fireblocks: Core Value, Positioning & Differentiators for Neobanks
Fireblocks is digital asset and stablecoin infrastructure built for institutions, not a consumer platform selling infrastructure on the side. Custody, embedded wallets, stablecoin accounts, compliance and reporting sit in one system, which is what lets a neobank start with one product and add the next without changing providers or re-papering its regulatory position.
Core Capabilities
- Multi-Party Computation security with patented MPC-CMP, distributing key shares so no single compromise exposes customer funds
- Three custody models on one platform: direct custody, qualified custody, and non-custodial embedded wallets
- Stablecoin infrastructure for holding, moving and structuring payment accounts, with Earn for yield on idle balances
- Policy Engine and Automation for transaction governance and no-code operational workflows
- A unified API and orchestration layer with full developer documentation and webhooks
- The Fireblocks Network for connectivity to liquidity providers, on and off-ramps, local payment rails and compliance partners through one integration
- Compliance tooling covering Travel Rule, transaction monitoring, AML and KYC, with reconciliation and audit-ready reporting
- Tokenization for issuing and managing tokenized deposit, savings or loyalty products
- Certifications and resilience evidence including SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, ISO 27017, ISO 27018 and CCSS
Value Proposition
For a neobank, the platform does five things:
- Lets you choose the custody model per product rather than per vendor
- Keeps the customer relationship, the brand and the interface yours
- Puts compliance and policy in the transaction path instead of in application code
- Produces the reconciliation and resilience evidence your auditors and regulators ask for
- Scales from a first market to many without replatforming or renegotiating your licence position
How Fireblocks Measures Up for Neobanks
The table below compares Fireblocks against the three alternatives neobank teams most commonly shortlist: a legacy custodian, an outsourced crypto-as-a-service provider, and building in-house.
| Capability | Fireblocks | Legacy Custodians | Outsourced Crypto-as-a-Service | In-House Build |
| Custody model options | Direct, qualified or non-custodial, chosen per product | Custodian holds assets | Provider holds assets | Self-managed |
| MPC-CMP key management | Full MPC-CMP | MPC or HSM, vendor-held | Not visible to you | Engineering burden |
| Retail wallet experience | Embedded wallets, social login, no seed phrases | Not offered | Provider-branded or templated | Must build from scratch |
| Stablecoin accounts and payments | Native, with configurable account structures | Not offered | Limited | Custom build required |
| Yield on stablecoin balances | Yes, via Earn | Varies by provider | Provider-set economics | Not available |
| Transaction-layer policy enforcement | Yes, Policy Engine | Vendor-defined rules | Provider-defined | Application layer only |
| Travel Rule and compliance toolkit | Native plus partner integrations | Partial, often manual | Provider-dependent | Custom build required |
| Resilience evidence for regulators | COR package, SOC 2 Type II, ISO certifications | Varies by provider | Provider-dependent | Self-certified |
| Reconciliation into existing finance systems | Yes | Partial | Provider reports only | Custom build required |
| Blockchain and asset coverage | 150+ networks, self-serve token additions | Limited asset set | Provider-selected | Limited by dev capacity |
The second row is the one worth pausing on. Outsourcing to a crypto-as-a-service provider is genuinely the fastest route to launch, and for a pilot it can be the right call. The cost appears later, when the provider holds the assets, sets the economics, and speaks to your customers through its own brand. Legacy custodians avoid that problem and introduce another, since custody alone does not give you the wallet experience, the payment flows or the reconciliation record. Building gives you everything and along with a permanent engineering commitment.
Leading Neobanks Trust Fireblocks
Revolut moved off a closed-loop custody model and replaced manual treasury operations to scale its finance platform. MAJORITY runs cross-border payments continuously for a customer base built around migrant communities, where settlement outside banking hours is the product rather than a feature. The Kingdom Bank built its regulated digital asset offering on the platform.
The pattern extends into adjacent consumer models. Oobit built a tap-and-pay experience that hides digital asset mechanics from the user entirely, and Wenia launched a digital asset platform for the Colombian market with the institutional backing and compliance posture that implies.
Broader adoption data across banking sits in The Financial Grid, a 2026 survey of more than 600 executives at financial institutions and corporates, alongside Fireblocks’ Banking and Tokenization resource hub.
From Evaluation to Launch for Neobanks
The path to production is structured, with professional services for implementation and integration work, and Global Platinum Support for consumer products that cannot wait on a ticket queue.
Sandbox Environment and Developer Tools
Simulate digital asset operations in the Fireblocks sandbox, complete with API users, transaction policies and prefunded wallets. Test custodial and embedded wallet flows, and the reconciliation output your finance team will inherit, before committing engineering time.
See a Live Demo
Connect with the team to see the custody models, Fireblocks Embedded Wallets and the Policy Engine working against your own product and licence structure.
