Standard Chartered adds RLUSD custody in Dubai with LMAX collateral link planned

Standard Chartered now offers institutional custody of Ripple's dollar-pegged stablecoin RLUSD on the XRP Ledger through its Dubai branch, CoinDesk reported. The service is available to eligible clients. The bank, which the report puts at nearly $450 billion in assets under management, also plans to work with Ripple and LMAX Group, an institutional trading venue for foreign exchange and digital assets, so clients can post RLUSD held at Standard Chartered as collateral for trading on LMAX's platform.

The collateral arrangement is not live. Standard Chartered said Monday by email that it remains subject to documentation, testing, regulatory requirements and internal approvals. The custody is available now; the trading utility is still a plan.

Under the proposal, LMAX would accept RLUSD held at Standard Chartered to back trades, so a client would not need to transfer the stablecoin to the venue. That separates custody from execution: the bank keeps the tokens and the venue accepts their value as collateral.

Waqar Chaudry, Standard Chartered's global head of digital assets, securities services and transaction services, said institutional clients "want to participate in digital asset markets without compromising on how their assets are safeguarded or how risk is managed."

The Dubai offering is part of a wider build. Last week Standard Chartered said it planned to offer institutional clients in Singapore custody for selected cryptocurrencies, stablecoins and tokenized real-world assets, having fully acquired Zodia Custody earlier this year. In August it became the first bank to distribute one of Hong Kong's two regulated stablecoins, per CoinDesk; its HKMA-licensed stablecoin HKDAP was entering beta with institutional distribution and tokenized settlement as the aim.

Ripple provided LMAX with $150 million in financing in January as part of plans to embed the stablecoin in the group's infrastructure, including institutional trading, per CoinDesk. If completed, the Standard Chartered arrangement would give RLUSD a route into collateral systems behind institutional trading rather than limiting the token to payments or spot settlement.