A forty-year-old Texas bank is entering the national stage to challenge Wall Street’s efforts to take over the digital assets industry.
United Texas Bank (UTB) received approval from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) to transition from a state-chartered financial institution to a nationally chartered bank on May 15, Scott Beck, the company’s president and CEO, told CoinDesk on Wednesday.
The conversion move, Beck added, involves positioning its crypto-friendly bank as the primary bridge between the cryptocurrency industry and traditional financial institutions and providing digital asset services. He said UTB has years to fully deliver, while “Wall Street continues to tiptoe around.”
The conversion granted by the OCC came with two conditions that Beck said have now been met. “These conditions were met today, May 27,” he said. Since 2024, UTB has operated under a consent order with the Federal Reserve, related to its Bank Secrecy Act and compliance infrastructure.
“Rather than view this as a setback, we treated it as a mandate to build something exceptional, and we did. The result is UTB PRISM SENTINAL, our proprietary BSA/AML compliance platform,” he said.
This milestone makes UTB one of the first banks in the United States to successfully complete an OCC conversion since the passage of the Dodd-Frank Act 15 years ago, Beck added. He said the conversion also uniquely positions UTB as a bridge between crypto companies around the world and the U.S. banking system, access that very few banks today are willing to grant.
“The concept of United Texas Bank is a centralized center of value,” said the president of UTB, a bank he said is unknown nationally but widely sought after by crypto companies.
“If you’re a digital asset player, you can’t open an account at a Bank of America or a Citibank. You can come to United Texas Bank and have full access to the U.S. dollar,” he said, adding that his bank has been providing services to well-known crypto companies for about five years, processing more than $120 billion in transactions annually for them.
Alongside the giants
Beck explained that the OCC’s strategic conversion puts the Dallas-based institution on equal footing with money center giants like Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase, granting it an identical federal license, full trust powers and direct access to the Federal Reserve’s electronic and ACH systems, while retaining the FDIC insurance it had.
However, unlike traditional Wall Street firms beginning to explore the crypto ecosystem, UTB “already supports a massive share of global crypto liquidity, unlocking $10 billion per month in US dollar volume for foreign banks, over-the-counter (OTC) desks, and major exchanges.”
UTB is not alone in the race for a competitive place in the growing US crypto sector. Last week, Minnesota enacted new rules allowing local banks to compete against Wall Street for cryptocurrency profits. State banks and credit unions have joined forces with lawmakers to pass legislation granting them permission to provide crypto custody services to their customers.
For UTB, the conversion marks an ambitious operational turning point, Beck added. While crypto startups have spent years seeking limited, trust-only charters that exclude them from the Federal Reserve’s payment rails, UTB’s national charter circumvents these restrictions entirely.
A first in the United States
“We are the first to move to the national banking stage with full access to the Federal Reserve for wire transfers and ACH,” Beck added.
By moving away from the Texas Banking Department and positioning itself directly under the OCC, UTB aligned its corporate structure with that of the executive branch of the federal government, protecting its clients from the fractured regulatory landscape that historically stifled crypto companies, Beck said.
To further leverage its federal upgrade, the bank is launching UTB Atomic, an artificial intelligence-driven real-time payments network designed to restore the 24-hour liquidity infrastructure that collapsed when Silvergate and Signature Bank did so.
In a 24/7 crypto market, traditional bank shutdowns create huge settlement bottlenecks for institutional traders operating at 3:00 a.m. UTB Atomic solves this problem by enabling instant off-balance sheet clearing between institutional clients while a parallel AI network, UTB Prism Sentinel, continuously performs real-time blockchain monitoring to neutralize non-compliance risks, Beck explained.
“The biggest issue facing large financial institutions is the ability to actually track what’s happening as payments are made,” Beck said, adding that the system is specifically designed to pass upcoming regulatory thresholds such as the federal stable frameworks under the GENIUS Act and the Clarity Act.
With a full-service digital asset custody and trust service scheduled to launch this summer, UTB aims to bridge traditional finance and crypto and position itself as the native financial plumbing for the next era of global commerce, Beck said.
