SBI's Nick Vitalis on What Banks Need From Crypto

Nick Vitalis spent 16 years at Goldman Sachs before joining SBI, the Japanese financial group, to work on digital assets. At Mining Disrupt Miami 2021, held July 20 and 21, 2021, he gave a short keynote on what large banks would need before digital assets could sit beside the products they already sell. When he spoke, Bitcoin traded at $32,125. On October 20, 2026, it was $81,690.

Vitalis is VP Product and Business Development at SBI Crypto. He started his career in technology at Goldman Sachs in New York, then moved to the business side and later to Asia. About five years before the talk, a former Goldman colleague brought him to SBI, which is listed in Japan and was building what he called an ecosystem around digital assets.

His argument was that digital assets fix real problems in traditional finance. The first two he named were transparency and reconciliation. He had done plenty of reconciliations himself. In his words, "the endless number of reconciliations that people have to do and I've done a fair amount of them and I can tell you they're not fun."

He took on the security objection directly. Crypto is exposed to attacks and hacks, he agreed, but he said that from a regular perspective the risk is small, and that security had improved a great deal. On cost, he pointed to money that once took a day or two to move by wire and could now settle instantly.

He noted that Goldman was setting up a trading desk and a digital assets division again, and that MicroStrategy and Tesla had invested. But those firms, he said, still asked the same questions: how to hedge, and how to control value at risk, because they are using shareholders' money.

That, he said, would reach mining too. Banks would expect certification and verification they could show their auditors, digital assets that fit their existing systems, and fees that fall over time. He called custody a race to zero. He also expected industry standards to arrive, since every operator ran its business differently.

Vitalis then described SBI. He said it had operated in Japan for about 20 years, had more than 20 offices worldwide, and served more than 24 million clients as a retail online broker. Five years before the talk it began building digital asset units, including SBI Crypto. It mines for itself in the US, Europe and Asia, runs its own custody, and had invested more than two billion dollars across digital assets, blockchain and AI funds.

He closed with two products: SBI Crypto pool, which at the time carried a zero pool fee promotion, and SBI Wallet, the custody platform SBI used for its own business before offering it to others.

The full story is on Intelligence Disrupt at intelligencedisrupt dot com, and many more like it play around the clock on Bitcoin Radio.