Michael Benz, appointed head of Asia Pacific at AMINA Bank in August 2025, brought more than three decades of private banking and wealth management experience to the Swiss digital asset bank. He previously served as global head of private banking at Standard Chartered, and earlier as CEO of Merrill Lynch Wealth Management Asia and head of product and services for UBS Wealth Management Asia Pacific — roles that forged deep relationships with the region’s ultra-high-net-worth clientele and established his reputation for governance and product innovation. Benz now leads AMINA’s Asia franchise from Hong Kong, tasked with scaling its institutional client base and building strategic partnerships across the region. Ahead of the launch of full operations in Hong Kong, he said that AMINA Bank was establishing its regional presence under the city’s virtual-asset regime, positioning the Swiss-regulated institution as a trusted bridge between fiat and digital markets for professional investors in Asia. Founded in 2018, AMINA was among Switzerland’s first licensed digital-asset banks regulated by the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA). Unlike traditional institutions bolting on crypto desks, AMINA was designed from inception for the digital-asset economy, combining custody, trading, lending and tokenisation within a prudent banking framework. Benz said this foundation allowed the bank to deliver compliance, liquidity and risk management at banking standards while opening access to new digital instruments. “We are a regulated and trustworthy bridge between fiat and digital,” he said. “That means institutional-grade custody, transparent on- and off-ramps, and the ability to deploy digital assets as collateral—something most banks still cannot do." In financial year 2024, AMINA’s revenue rose 69% to $40.4 million while assets under management grew 136% to $4.2 billion on $801 million of net inflows. The bank also reported its first quarterly profit in the final quarter of the year and maintained a Common Equity Tier 1 (CET1) capital ratio of 34%, with zero defaults on its CHF 100 million ($110 million) fully crypto-collateralised loan book. Hong Kong launch: regulated beachhead for Asia Benz said AMINA’s immediate priority was the Hong Kong hub—its first operational pillar in Asia and second globally after Switzerland. In November 2023, the bank obtained Type 1 (dealing in securities), Type 4 (advising on securities) and Type 9 (asset management) licences from Hong Kong’s Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) and expected to begin full operations by year-end. “Regulatory clarity is critical,” he said. “The more clearly governments define the rules, the faster institutional adoption happens.” He pointed to Hong Kong’s Virtual Asset Trading Platform (VATP) framework, Singapore’s Payment Services Act and Japan’s digital-asset guidelines as examples of how Asia has moved faster in providing regulatory clarity than Europe or the United States, where frameworks such as the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA) are still being phased in and US rules remain fragmented. AMINA’s Hong Kong revenue grew 570% year on year in 2024, underscoring early traction among regional clients Benz characterised as “sharp, transactional, and highly price-sensitive”. He said the bank was localising its Swiss-regulated model for Asian institutions that sought both compliance assurance and product flexibility. “Asia, and especially Hong Kong, is particularly meaningful for AMINA,” Benz added. “Some of our largest shareholders are from Hong Kong and we have a strong connectivity and focus here." He noted that the bank operates a "hub-and-spoke" model out of Hong Kong, which enables it to cover the region: "We’re able to serve our clients in a completely agnostic way as long as the client’s country allows.” In August 2025, AMINA announced a partnership with Nasdaq-listed Metalpha to co-develop digital-asset wealth-management solutions. Their first product collaboration, Principal Fund I, provides exposure to publicly traded crypto-related firms such as Coinbase, Circle and MicroStrategy, as well as crypto-linked equities listed in Hong Kong. Distributed through AMINA Hong Kong, the fund is managed via Metalpha’s asset-management platform, giving AMINA a local channel to reach professional investors in the city. Beyond Hong Kong, AMINA had been licensed in Abu Dhabi since 2022 under the Financial Services Regulatory Authority (FSRA) of Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM). The licence covered custody, credit, investment and advisory services, contributing to a gradual regional build-out. Benz cautioned that FINMA oversight, while a strong signal of credibility, was not a passport to other markets. “Every jurisdiction had its own set of rules,” he said. Where digital-asset banking goes beyond TradFi Benz said AMINA’s differentiation stems from the way it integrated custody, credit and trading in one prudential framework — functions that remained siloed or restricted in most traditional banks. The offering spanned institutional-grade custody; fiat–crypto on/off-ramps; a broad investment suite that included crypto funds and discretionary portfolio management; derivatives and structured products; and spot trading across a wide range of digital assets. Crucially, AMINA accepts digital assets as collateral for secured lending, Benz said — a feature few regulated banks offer, given volatility and provenance risk. “We do so only after enhanced KYC, blockchain-traceability and risk checks,” he said. AMINA used third-party vendors for continuous anti-money-laundering screening and has enforced conservative loan-to-value ratios to manage market swings. The bank does not serve as an exchange, he added. Instead, it aggregates liquidity across multiple venues. Orders are routed automatically to the platform offering the best execution or handled by AMINA’s trading desks in Switzerland and Mumbai. Benz said that stablecoins — while not issued by AMINA — were “the oil in the machine” that enabled efficient movement between fiat and crypto markets. Custody and risk standards across jurisdictions Benz ranked custody among AMINA’s “top three most important services”. “The key challenge when investing in crypto was how safely you stored your private key,” he said, noting that more institutional clients now “trade on exchanges but custody with us” for regulatory assurance and security. In Switzerland, client assets are held in secure domestic facilities under FINMA oversight. Swiss law embeds digital assets within the Banking Act (BankA) and the Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) Act of 2021, ensuring fiduciary protection, asset segregation and client rights in insolvency—integrating digital custody into the prudential regime. Across Asia and the Middle East, regulators are converging on similar safeguards through different pathways. In Hong Kong, AMINA is partnering with a locally licensed custodian to meet SFC requirements to keep at least 98% of client assets in cold storage with board-level accountability for custody operations. In Abu Dhabi, the FSRA has taken a more technically prescriptive approach, mandating hardware-based key management and independent audits of custody systems. Reconciling these frameworks, Benz said, presents both a challenge and a differentiator: “It is testing our ability to maintain Swiss-level governance while adapting to regional compliance and infrastructure realities.” From crypto-natives to institutions: the private-banking discipline Benz said AMINA’s early clients were predominantly crypto-native individuals; the base has since expanded to family offices, professional investors and corporate treasuries seeking regulated exposure to digital assets. He viewed this shift as evidence of growing institutional confidence in banks that combined compliance, credit and crypto expertise under one roof. Drawing on his private-banking background, he argued that digital-asset banking needed the same principles of segmentation, suitability, transparency and governance that underpinned traditional wealth management. He added that AMINA’s clients “always have a name and a face to call,” with dedicated relationship managers contrasting with the impersonal nature of many digital platforms. “If you want to bring the next generation of institutional investors into this space,” he said, “you cannot just give them technology—you have to give them trust.” The challenge, he added, is to prove that digital-asset banking can match the fiduciary strength and client confidence of traditional finance—while offering the speed and transparency that define the digital era.
