Ripple Gets Its Bank Charter and a Seat at Wall Street

• The OCC granted Ripple final approval for a national trust bank.
• The bank will manage RLUSD reserves and offer institutional custody.
• Recent acquisitions let Ripple sell several services to one client.
• The charter does not by itself create new demand for XRP.

Ripple received final approval from the US Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) on October 26 to open Ripple National Trust Bank (RNTB), a federally supervised institution that will hold the reserves behind its RLUSD stablecoin and provide digital asset custody to institutional clients. The decision closes a process that began with an application in July 2025 and moved through conditional approval in December 2025. It landed on the same day Ripple rolled out an expanded corporate treasury platform, and that second announcement says more about where the company is heading than the charter does on its own.

The decision closes a process that began with an application in July 2025 and moved through conditional approval in December 2025. It landed on the same day Ripple rolled out an expanded corporate treasury platform, and that second announcement says more about where the company is heading than the charter does on its own.

What the OCC approval covers

RNTB gets three authorized functions: managing the segregated reserves that back RLUSD, acting as collateral trustee for those reserves on behalf of token holders, and offering fiduciary custody of digital assets. A trust charter of this kind does not let Ripple take ordinary deposits or make loans, and balances held there carry no FDIC deposit insurance, the federal guarantee that protects regular bank accounts.

Ripple also keeps its existing structure in place. Standard Custody & Trust, its New York-regulated subsidiary, continues to issue RLUSD, while BNY stays on as the primary reserve custodian, so the stablecoin now sits under supervision at both the state and federal level. Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse framed the approval as proof that digital asset firms and traditional banks can work inside the same system.

Source: Ripple

Five deals built the stack

The charter is the latest piece in a buying spree that has pushed Ripple well past cross-border payments. Its three disclosed 2025 acquisitions alone add up to roughly $2.45 billion in announced value, led by the $1.25 billion purchase of prime broker Hidden Road and the $1 billion acquisition of GTreasury.

Hidden Road was already clearing about $3 trillion a year for more than 300 institutional customers when Ripple bought it, which gave the company a foothold in how funds trade and finance positions. Some Ripple Prime derivatives clients now hold RLUSD as collateral, a use for the stablecoin that has little to do with exchange trading.

A $13 trillion back office that is hard to replace

Ripple Treasury, built on GTreasury, reports more than $13 trillion in payment volume and connections to around 13,000 banks, with clients that include American Airlines, Subway and Adecco. Those figures describe the established treasury business and say nothing about how much value moves on a blockchain, yet they put Ripple inside the daily cash operations of large corporations. Once a finance team runs its bank connections, approval chains and reporting through one system, replacing that system means migrating all of them, and that friction is what makes treasury software so hard to dislodge.

The DriveWealth partnership announced on October 14 shows how the pieces get sold together. The deal covers stablecoin settlement, cross-border payments, custody and possible equity financing through Ripple Prime, with RLUSD on the XRP Ledger planned for European settlement first, although several parts are still at the exploration stage. Standard Chartered, meanwhile, went live with institutional RLUSD custody through its Dubai (DIFC) branch on October 12 and is working with Ripple and LMAX Group on a collateral setup that still needs testing and approvals.

The bank charter does not require XRP

Ripple is a private company, and XRP is the native token of the XRP Ledger, so growth at one does not translate automatically into demand for the other. Many Ripple products run on RLUSD or conventional fiat rails, and the trust bank’s mandate covers reserves and custody with no requirement for clients to hold XRP. Ripple Treasury does support XRP alongside RLUSD, and some partnerships reference XRPL settlement, which means the useful question for holders is how much new institutional activity actually settles on the ledger.

Circle and BNY are chasing the same clients

Circle received its own final OCC trust bank approval in July 2026, and BNY announced tokenized deposit infrastructure in January aimed at programmable cash for institutions, so the charter mainly closes a gap with competitors that already hold, or are building, the same kind of federal standing. Senator Elizabeth Warren and community banking groups have also challenged the OCC’s approach to crypto trust charters, which could become a political issue for the regulator. Ripple says it now holds more than 85 licenses and registrations worldwide, and the next evidence of whether its stack works as one business will come from the Standard Chartered collateral approvals and DriveWealth’s planned move of RLUSD settlement from Europe into the US.