Neo · · 25 min
The 40-Year-Old Bank Quietly Banking Crypto's Exchanges and Market Makers
With Scott Beck
Key takeaways
Scott Beck says United Texas Bank moves $10 billion a month in US dollar clearing and has completed its conversion to a national bank under the OCC.
UTB Atomic, which Beck says is now live with 24/7 real-time fiat settlement, is positioned as the successor to Signet and SEN.
Beck argues Signature, Silicon Valley Bank and Silvergate failed from asset-liability mismatch, not crypto, and says United Texas Bank never lent out clients' operating funds.
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Summary
Scott Beck says his newly national Dallas bank avoided the asset-liability mismatch that sank Signature and Silvergate, and now runs a live 24/7 fiat settlement network for crypto firms.
United Texas Bank, a forty year old Dallas bank, moves $10 billion a month in US dollar clearing, according to Chairman and CEO Scott Beck. After working for the past year, the bank is now officially a national bank under the OCC rather than a state chartered one.
From foreign banks to crypto
Scott Beck says United Texas Bank has banked foreign banks for the past ten years, after large money center banks debanked many of them about fifteen years ago in what he calls choke point 1.0. Over the past seven years that work led it into banking domestic and foreign crypto companies. For scale, he notes that Citibank moves $1.2 trillion a day. Beck says that of the 4,300 US banks, all but a few rent technology from Jack Henry, Fiserv or FIS, while his bank built its own from the ground up "because we had to."
“When the digital infrastructure actually evaporates from the consumer seeing it, that's when you have parity.”
Atomic and Prism Sentinel
Two weeks before the interview, United Texas Bank announced its UTB Prism Sentinel compliance platform, which Beck describes as the ability to watch money as it moves, and the UTB Atomic network, now live for 24/7 real-time fiat settlement. Beck says there used to be two such networks, Signet and SEN, and "that is what UTB Atomic is." He says AI is embedded in both Atomic and Prism.
Banking 101
According to Scott Beck, Signature, Silicon Valley Bank and Silvergate did not fail because of their digital asset businesses or settlement networks, but because they forgot not to mismatch assets and liabilities. Beck, who says he has spent thirteen years in digital assets starting with building mining rigs, says he refused to lend out clients' operating funds, and "we didn't fail" as a result.
Clients and integrations
United Texas Bank serves exchanges, OTC desks, market makers, DAOs and mining companies, and Beck confirms Bitso is a client. He wants it to be a B2B treasury management bank that accepts fiat, crypto, stablecoins and real-world assets. The bank built an API layer on its core so builders connect directly, and it interoperates with Fireblocks through its Network Link system. His advice to builders: keep building and find an innovative institution rather than adapting to rigid banks.
Scott Beck calls this the best time ever to be in finance, with the Stablecoin Act passed and the industry waiting for the CLARITY Act. He expects only a few of the hundreds of stablecoin startups to survive, sees Fireblocks as one of the likely winners among the Amazon-like companies of digital assets, and says parity will come when the digital infrastructure disappears from consumers' view.
United Texas Bank, Fireblocks, Bitso, and OCC come up most.
- People
- Scott Beck
- Daniel Vogel
- Drew Rogers
- Companies
- United Texas Bank
- Fireblocks
- Bitso
- OCC
- Bank of America
- Citibank
- Amazon
- Dakota
- FIS
- Fiserv
- Jack Henry
- Silicon Valley Bank
- Silvergate
- US Department of Treasury
- JPMorgan
- Agora
- Anthropic
- Bridge
- Mastercard
- Wells Fargo
- White House
- UTB Financial Holdings
- Signature Bank
- Visa Ventures
- Dfns
