(Bloomberg) — Whampoa Group, a prominent private family office in Singapore, plans to set up a digital bank in Bahrain whose services will include round-the-clock payments and settlement for digital-asset companies.

The goal is to establish the bank by year-end and provide banking services as well as the trading, custody and asset management of digital tokens, according to a statement from Whampoa Group. The firm’s founders include Lee Han Shih, a member of the Lee family that founded Oversea-Chinese Banking Corp. and Amy Lee, the niece of the city-state’s founding prime minister.

A government spokesperson for Bahrain said the nation’s central bank has “granted an in principle approval” to Whampoa Group for the venture, adding the “approval is tentative and a full license will only be granted after all regulatory requirements have been met.”

Many existing lenders are wary of working with digital-asset firms following last year’s market rout and blowups like the FTX exchange. The sector also lost round-the-clock payments rails when crypto friendly lenders Signature Bank and Silver gate Capital Corp. collapsed in this year’s US banking turmoil.

Whampoa Group last year said it intended to raise US$50million for a crypto-related hedge fund and deploy US$100 million for a venture-capital fund for the digital-asset sector. Before that, the group was part of a consortium led by ByteDance Ltd. that applied for but didn’t receive a digital-bank license in Singapore.

Jurisdictions globally are seeking to clarify and strengthen the regulation of digital assets. Some like Bahrain, Dubai and Hong Kong are trying to attract crypto-related investment. In contrast, the US has cracked down on the sector.

©2023 Bloomberg L.P.

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Reporting by Suvashree Ghosh

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