Kristin Myers: Now, for most of the last decade, the biggest banks in the world told you that cryptocurrency was a joke. Now, some of their chief executives said so, standing right here on the floor of the Stock Exchange.
And when they said it, they were talking about Bitcoin. But what they quietly did next was take the technology that powers crypto and start rebuilding their own plumbing with it.
Today's company builds that plumbing, and its customers are the banks.
First, let's take a look at what they're building. The road from an idea to the opening bell starts right now.
Banks close. Markets close. But digital money never sleeps.
And as Wall Street moves deeper into digital assets, someone must build the infrastructure behind it. And that's where Taurus sees a massive opportunity.
Co-founded by former banking executive Lamine Brahimi, the Swiss fintech is building technology that allows financial institutions to custody, tokenize, trade, and move digital assets.
And now the stakes are getting even bigger.
Taurus has connected its technology to SWIFT's new blockchain-based ledger, designed to support tokenized deposits and cross-border payments around the clock.
It has also joined Circle's Arc network as a digital asset custody provider.
But here's the billion-dollar question: If the future of finance moves on-chain, who controls the infrastructure underneath it?
And can Taurus become one of the companies powering the next generation of global banking?
From Startup to Stock Exchange, Lamine Brahimi is next.
And joining us now at the desk is Lamine Brahimi, co-founder and managing partner at Taurus.
Lamine, thank you so much for joining us today.
Lamine Brahimi: Thanks for having me.
Kristin Myers: So I want to start a little bit with your background. You were the Deputy COO, so the Chief Operating Officer, at Lombard Odier, which is a Swiss private bank, and that's been around since almost 1800, 1796.
Lamine Brahimi: A little bit older than that.
Kristin Myers: So what made you leave Lombard Odier to start Taurus?
Lamine Brahimi: Two main reasons.
One, I always wanted to be an entrepreneur, so I wanted to be, you know, able to run my own company.
And the second one is more coincidental. While I was at Lombard Odier, I was leading all the digital initiatives of the bank, and the partners asked me, you know, "What is this Bitcoin thing?"
So I'm an engineer by training, looked at it in a little bit of detail, and with some good friends, we said there are two things that are going to happen.
One is the technology is amazing, but we're lacking the technology to have the banks interact with it in a safe manner.
And the second thing, this business will be regulated.
Kristin Myers: Okay. So let's talk a little bit about Taurus and what you guys do.
So a bank calls you up. What are they buying from you guys?
Lamine Brahimi: Yeah. So Taurus, we're well known in the industry for our technology solutions.
So regardless of a bank's regulatory framework or risk tolerance, they can buy, first, custody solutions to safeguard the assets of their clients.
It can be Bitcoin, but it can also be stablecoins, tokenized securities, tokenized money market funds.
But we also have an integrated tokenization engine that allows them to create all the products they want.
Kristin Myers: Okay. So you said that word custody. It comes up a lot in terms of what you do, but what does it actually mean to custody a digital asset for those that are watching and aren't too sure?
Lamine Brahimi: Yeah. So I will answer in two steps.
Custody, in the pure tech definition, is protecting the private keys related to the blockchain addresses.
So you're basically building a digital fortress that prevents insiders, but also external attackers, from stealing those private keys.
But in the regulated, let's say, term or way of custody, it's really being able to manage the full lifecycle of the securities throughout their life.
And that's what we provide.
Kristin Myers: And why can't a bank just do it the way that it holds every other, you know, asset that they own?
Lamine Brahimi: Because the technology is radically different.
Typically, in traditional finance, you know, the securities are technically booked in databases.
The blockchains are distributed databases, which require a very specific type of technology.
That's what we built, and that's what also others have built.
Kristin Myers: But you're not building the blockchain for the banks. Your software and your technology is interacting with the existing blockchain that the bank already has to build?
Lamine Brahimi: Great question.
So, yes, we interact with the blockchains. We assume they exist.
You know, there are dozens of them. At the time of this interview, we support 45 blockchains, whether EVM, Ethereum Virtual Machine, or non-EVM, public or private.
Kristin Myers: So for a long time, as I mentioned at the very beginning, the big banks were going around saying that, you know, crypto was fraudulent. It was a joke.
We've heard a lot of billionaire investors really try to dissuade investors from going towards crypto.
So when did the phones really start ringing for you guys?
Lamine Brahimi: So we are a Swiss-based company, and we are very lucky.
We were created in April 2018, and in May 2018, so like a month after, we won our first bank.
But I just flew in from Sibos, at the SWIFT annual conference, from Miami. And that's what I told some executives.
Until one or two years ago, you really needed to be brave in the bank to propose such solutions.
Today, and you can look at the post-debriefs, it has really become a C-level agenda point. All the banks are looking at digital finance, as they say.
Kristin Myers: Are there changes in what banks are asking from you now versus what they were asking you three, five years ago?
Lamine Brahimi: Yeah.
So three or five years ago, the ask was mostly, you know, for the banks to propose cryptocurrency custody and staking, either for retail investors or for high-net-worth individuals that were kind of forward-looking.
Today, the ask is really on cryptocurrencies, tokenized deposits and stablecoins, as well as tokenizing securities.
It can be government bonds. It can be money market funds. So across the whole spectrum of financial instruments.
Kristin Myers: Is there at all an indicator, based on what they're asking you now versus what they were asking you three years ago, about where they're headed next for the next five years?
Lamine Brahimi: That's a great question.
I think the banks are regulated, so they will be going where the regulation allows them to go.
So what's amazing in the U.S., SAB 121 was repealed a few quarters ago, and the GENIUS Act, you know, entered into force, and we're waiting for the CLARITY Act.
So I think for the five years to go, you're going to see those three engines, whether cryptocurrencies, or tokenized deposits and stablecoins, or tokenized money market funds, accelerate massively.
Hopefully, a few trillions of assets on-chain.
Kristin Myers: So as you mentioned, you're a Swiss company, and anyone that's listening can obviously hear the French accent.
So I'm curious to know, when you were pitching these banks, I was going to say we could do this interview in French, but no one at home would be able to understand that.
But you're regulated there. You're regulated inside of Switzerland.
And so how much of your push to the bank is the actual technology? But how much of the fact that you are essentially regulated and you have the compliance already worked out, how much is that also part of that?
Lamine Brahimi: That's super important because, you know, today the financial institutions have become very sophisticated.
And we're talking to, you know, senior managers, executives that have a fine understanding.
And obviously, if you're able to talk their language, if you also abide by the same rules as them, you have a certain level of credibility.
But in the end, what really matters is having a great product.
And our product has been built and honed, as I said, since 2018.
And that's what the banks are expecting: something that is super secure, but that also allows them to manage their tokenized assets in a professional and super scalable manner.
That's what we do.
Kristin Myers: Well, how has the interest been here in the United States from, you know, U.S. banks and in fintech?
Lamine Brahimi: So I can disclose public information.
State Street has been a dear client of ours since 2024.
We have also market makers that are clients of ours. I can disclose FalconX.
But we also have very big financial institutions, which I'll be happy to comment on next time I'm in New York.
Kristin Myers: I'm going to hold you to that. We're going to have to bring you back, bring you back.
But so, talking about those banks, some of them are your investors. Are they also clients?
How do you guys keep those things separate?
Lamine Brahimi: I think it was really made naturally.
We prefer industrial partnerships rather than pure financial ones.
So when we raised, you know, we were focused on banks. So when we were raising money, we were talking to our clients.
They're clients. We're raising funds. Are you interested?
And this is how it happened.
So today, we have UBS as a shareholder, Deutsche Bank as a shareholder, and others that, you know, we can talk about next time.
Kristin Myers: Again, we'll have to bring you back to have a discussion on some of that.
So talk to me a little bit more about, again, some of that investment interest, how that essentially has been going with you guys.
I'm assuming the banks and the investment interest that you've had, has it primarily been inside of Europe and with a lot of Swiss banks that have been invested? But have you also seen a lot of investment interest from the banks here as well?
Lamine Brahimi: Investment interest in what respect?
Kristin Myers: Investing in Taurus.
Lamine Brahimi: We receive every quarter requests from private equity firms.
But, you know, we raised a decent amount of money, close to $100 million cumulatively.
We are capital efficient, so we will do the things that really matter to us.
The origin of the partners is not necessarily important. We want to be global.
What's really important to us is really, do we have the same strategic alignment?
Well, maybe one day we list on the New York Stock Exchange.
Kristin Myers: So there are two ways to move money between two banks.
So here's how it works now.
A payment from New York to Singapore, for example, passes through a chain of correspondent banks. Each one keeps its own ledger, and each one is going to take a fee.
Now, that is, many folks who have done banking know, it's going to take about one to three business days to settle.
And the system is closed on nights, on weekends, and on holidays.
Now, the other way is the way that the industry is testing right now, and that is with a shared ledger.
So here's how that works.
Both banks are going to be looking at the same record, settling against a tokenized deposit, or a claim on real money at a real bank.
And that takes minutes instead of days, and there is no closing time.
Now, SWIFT, that's the messaging network that 11,000 institutions already use, is building one of these, which is the part that makes this different from every crypto promise that came before it.
We're back now with Lamine Brahimi, co-founder and managing partner at Taurus.
So, Lamine, let's again talk about those tokenized deposits that I was, you know, sort of just mentioning.
What's the difference between that and a stablecoin?
Lamine Brahimi: So a tokenized deposit stays, if I really answer it in a very simple manner, a tokenized deposit stays on the balance sheet of a bank, which is on their liabilities, that they tokenize and put on-chain.
A stablecoin doesn't stay on the balance sheet of a bank.
Kristin Myers: So why does a bank, explain a little bit and say more about why the bank really needs that distinction and why they care so much about that distinction between the two?
Lamine Brahimi: You know, that was one of the contentious points of the CLARITY Act.
We, by the way, published a paper a year ago about, you know, stablecoins and the risk on, you know, bank deposits.
So the distinction is very important because if you assume that stablecoins really become prevalent, banks will lose some of the most important and cheapest ways of funding.
That's why the SWIFT Ledger initiative that you just mentioned is super important, because it's going to bring at scale tokenized deposits.
It has the opportunity to stay on the bank's balance sheet, to have the exact same standard, and to be transferable 24/7.
Kristin Myers: Okay. So speaking about SWIFT, as I just mentioned, they're the incumbent.
11,000 institutions currently utilize SWIFT, and they're building the thing that could essentially, almost in a way, replace itself.
Or is that not really the right way to think about it?
Lamine Brahimi: I think that's the right way to do it because, you know, Steve Jobs, I think, was the guy who was saying, you know, you prefer to cannibalize yourself than let stablecoins or whomever, competitors, cannibalize you.
So I think SWIFT's move is the right move.
And by the way, we've integrated with SWIFT Ledger.
A few weeks ago, we announced it in record time.
I think we are the first company in the world that has a fully unified SWIFT Ledger integration, and you're going to have a live transaction in a couple of weeks.
And I'm really sorry, I cannot disclose it yet.
Kristin Myers: Again, in a couple of weeks or a year, we're going to have to ask you to...
Lamine Brahimi: Invite me again.
Kristin Myers: You're already invited. This is your carte blanche invitation back to the show.
So question then.
If you've integrated with SWIFT's shared ledger, what does that mean in terms of how many banks that you could essentially work with?
I'm not sure quite how SWIFT works with 11,000 institutions, but is their plumbing ready to plug and play for all 11,000 of them?
Lamine Brahimi: Not yet. Not yet.
So SWIFT has been very clear. They have a very clear roadmap.
For the time being, they have issued what they call an MVP.
But the objective, obviously, is to scale it to the 11,000 banks.
We work with 40, 45 banks today. And if we get, you know, 10 to 20 within the next 12 months, it's going to be very good.
Kristin Myers: So the capacity then for you to work with SWIFT's shared ledger means that it sounds like you'd be able to also piggyback on their roadmap as well, for banks that are interested in utilizing Taurus.
Lamine Brahimi: It's mutually beneficial because they could, we are already bringing some of our clients on the SWIFT Ledger, but they probably and certainly have clients that are not equipped that they can refer to us and to other competitors and peers.
Kristin Myers: To that point, competitors, do you have any that are also integrated with that shared ledger from SWIFT?
Lamine Brahimi: For the time being, with a unified, total, complete integration, not yet.
It's going to happen, obviously, but we're very proud to be the first.
Kristin Myers: All right. First through the door.
Okay, so let's keep talking about tokenization.
There's tokenized money market funds. They're the use case that everyone has been pointing at lately.
So what does that let an institution do now with a tokenized money market fund that they couldn't do before?
Lamine Brahimi: Tokenized money market funds, you can see different use cases or benefits to it.
The first one, and I will list them not necessarily in a particular order, the first one is, you know, you have a few hundreds of billions of stablecoins.
They do not generate yield.
And the first, I would say, demand would be to temporarily swap stablecoins to tokenized money market funds.
You generate yield for a certain, you know, for the moment you need, and then you swap back to stablecoin to do your payments.
The other use case we see a lot, especially being discussed in SWIFT conference tables the last few days, was all things related to collateral mobility.
So mobilizing tokenized money market funds to do same-day repo, overnight repo.
Those are the two main things that we're...
Kristin Myers: And I can understand that's particularly important for a money market fund, that immediacy of the role.
Lamine Brahimi: Exactly.
And we work with our U.S. clients, but also our big clients, with the DTCC that has announced a few quarters ago, you know, the roadmap to go on-chain.
And the tokenized money market fund repo is also an important use case for them.
Kristin Myers: So I want to talk about essentially the downsides to some of these efficiencies because right now, 24/7 settlement, that's great.
That's obvious progress moving the financial system forward.
However, the current financial system doesn't work that way, right?
So what happens when you have this new technology that is enabling this efficiency and this consistency around the clock when it runs into the current tech that doesn't operate that way?
Does something break? What happens with that tension?
Lamine Brahimi: It's a very, very, very good question.
The reality is there will be coexistence for the foreseeable future.
And you're going to see, you know, gradually, you know, when people were going from on-premise mainframe installation to the cloud, you're going to see that grow progressively.
And I cannot predict the future.
But what I'm sure of, it's going to be in parallel for a certain amount of time.
Kristin Myers: All right. I've got two quick questions to ask you, and I want to ask you about going public, but we're going to end the show on that.
I want to ask you a little bit about what is post-quantum.
That was something that came up. Talk to us a little bit about that, how institutions are thinking.
Lamine Brahimi: It is a super relevant topic in the area of blockchain.
So post-quantum are two things.
One, nobody knows when the Q-Day will come, concretely, when a quantum-capable computer can break any cryptographic cipher.
However, what we know is that the blockchains have announced publicly they do not want to take the risk of uncertainty.
They are gradually, as of today, migrating their signatures to post-quantum signatures.
And by the way, Taurus, we are one of the co-authors of one of the National Institute of Standards and Technology post-quantum standards.
So what it means is that the financial institutions need to make sure, when they select a partner like us or some of our peers, that they are post-quantum ready.
We are post-quantum ready.
Some existing signatures are not, and they will never be able to because there is a mathematical impossibility to support certain post-quantum signatures.
So that's very, very important.
And I encourage, you know, banks, clients, CSDs, stock exchanges, to have a particular and very specific look at this.
Kristin Myers: So let's talk, since we're on the floor of the Stock Exchange, we've got the bell right over there.
Curious to know, what do you think about when you think about that day of potentially ringing the bell?
And do you have any insight on when you might do that?
Lamine Brahimi: That would be, you know, when I was a kid, it was always a dream to do this.
As I told you before, I always wanted to be an entrepreneur, and it's the very first time I'm on the floor.
So, you know, it reminds me of my childhood dreams.
It may happen. It may not. I don't know.
You know, I'm Mediterranean and we believe in destiny.
Kristin Myers: I absolutely love that.
You know, most five-year-olds are dreaming about being, you know, a fireman or something, and you were dreaming about ringing the bell of the New York Stock Exchange, which I think means that it is definitely going to happen.
Thank you, Lamine Brahimi, co-founder and managing partner at Taurus.
Lamine Brahimi: Thank you for having me.
Kristin Myers: Thanks so much for joining us.
