Inside Coinbase Institutional's ambition to bring its tech stack to banks

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• Key insights: Coinbase's institutional business is looking to bring its trading infrastructure to more banks and financial institutions. 
  
• What's at stake: As demand for 24/7 liquidity continues to grow among institutional investors, banks need to upgrade their tech stacks, or risk their clients leaving. 
  
• Forward look: Coinbase Institutional co-CEO Brett Tejpaul said he is preparing for a "massive activation" in digital assets.

NEW YORK —  Coinbase has long been best known for its retail trading platform, but it's been making big investments in its institutional business as well.

The thesis is relatively simple: More institutional investors want to be able to trade digital assets all day, every day, and banks need to get on board or risk their clients leaving. 

"You now have a client set that wants to trade 24/7, and they want to trade a bunch of things next to one another, and the [technology] stack that you have doesn't work," Brett Tejpaul, co-CEO of Coinbase Institutional, said at American Banker's On-Chain Executive Summit in New York on Thursday. 

"I can apply our infrastructure to help that problem," Tejpaul said, who spent two decades on Wall Street in a variety of executive positions at JPMorganChase and Barclays. "This is like our pivot from Amazon to AWS, where everything I've built I'm now exposing to the likes of PayPal, JPMorganChase, PNC, the whole world that wants to use the stack to do better, faster, cheaper." 

Tejpaul wants to partner with banks and hedge funds for trading strategies, and anticipates increased uptake as financial institutions recognize the benefits of the technology. 

"We have places like JPMorganChase and Standard Chartered that have actually made huge investments over the past many years to actually activate their own native capabilities," Tejpaul said. "I'm not sitting here as an ex-banker who left the system who thinks it's entirely broken. That's not my narrative. My narrative is, there's a new, emerging financial system. It's better, faster, cheaper, and it's robust."

American Banker's On-Chain Finance Summit is an invitation-only conference that explores how the digital asset economy is transforming traditional finance.