Standard Chartered just dropped its best annual results since CEO Bill Winters joined in 2015. The bank posted a record $20.9 billion in operating income, up 8% year-on-year excluding notable items, and an underlying return on tangible equity of 14.7%. Exceeding its own three-year target a full year ahead of schedule. The share price has moved accordingly, trading near a ten-year high with a 52-week range of 873p to 1,875p on the London Stock Exchange. A $1.5 billion share buyback is already underway, and the full-year dividend rose 65%.
That’s the headline. But the more interesting story is what’s happening underneath. Standard Chartered is making calculated bets on blockchain infrastructure, quantum computing, and institutional digital assets that most of its GSIB peers are still tiptoeing around. Whether all of it pays off remains to be seen, but the direction is unmistakable.
B2C2 Partnership Unlocks Institutional Crypto Access
On February 11, Standard Chartered announced a strategic partnership with B2C2, one of the largest institutional liquidity providers in digital assets. B2C2, majority-owned by Japanese financial giant SBI, serves hedge funds, asset managers, family offices, and crypto foundations around the clock. Under the deal, B2C2’s institutional clients will gain direct connectivity to Standard Chartered’s banking rails and settlement infrastructure.
The intent is to reduce friction between fiat and crypto and to make settlement faster and more reliable. Luke Boland, Head of Fintech Asia at Standard Chartered, put it plainly: “digital assets are moving from the periphery to the core of global finance, and the bank wants to be the regulated layer that makes it work without sacrificing execution quality.”
B2C2’s Group CEO Thomas Restout said the two firms are building a “durable connectivity layer between traditional finance and the digital asset ecosystem.” That kind of language from a CEO tells you this is a long-term strategic commitment, not a headline grab.
Spot Bitcoin & Ether Trading Goes Live for Institutions
It’s worth noting that Standard Chartered already became the first GSIB to offer spot Bitcoin and Ether trading to institutional clients through its UK branch in 2025. This B2C2 partnership is the logical next move, expanding the client base and deepening the liquidity infrastructure behind that offering. As we covered in How Standard Chartered Became a Leader in Digital Assets, the bank has been building this playbook quietly for years. Now it’s scaling it.
Qubitra JV Brings Quantum Power to Finance
In January 2026, SC Ventures, Standard Chartered’s venture arm, and Fujitsu formally unveiled the roadmap for Qubitra Technologies, a UK-headquartered joint venture focused on deploying quantum computing in financial services.
We covered the initial announcement here on Disruption Banking: Fujitsu and SC Ventures Launch Qubitra Technologies Quantum Roadmap.
Qubitra is already working with financial institutions, including Standard Chartered itself, on fraud detection, derivatives pricing, and trading in financial markets. First go-lives are expected in early 2026. The platform, backed by Fujitsu’s quantum hardware and its Digital Annealer technology, will eventually host a marketplace where quantum software and hardware providers can connect with end users across the full quantum stack.
CEO Vishal Shete previously ran operations at Terra Quantum. COO Daniel Wynne was the founding COO of Carbonplace. And CSO Kugendran Naidoo joins from J.P. Morgan, with eight years at IBM leading quantum research before that.
Alex Manson, CEO of SC Ventures, described the mission as using frontier technologies to “rewire the DNA in banking and beyond.” That might sound ambitious, but the practical applications: faster risk calculations, better fraud detection, and more accurate derivative pricing, are genuinely valuable. If quantum-enabled tools can cut computation time on complex financial models from hours to seconds, the competitive edge for early adopters will be significant. Fujitsu’s CTO Vivek Mahajan confirmed the approach: novel machine learning and optimization techniques that harness both current and future quantum devices.
The MVP marketplace is set to launch with a pilot group in 2026, with a full rollout following. For a bank that’s already running one of the most ambitious digital asset programmes among its GSIB peers, this quantum move adds another dimension to what Standard Chartered is building.
Tokenization & RWAs: $2 Trillion Opportunity by 2028
Standard Chartered’s full-year 2025 results show a bank that has successfully integrated digital asset and tokenization strategy into its core growth story. Global Banking income rose 15%, and Global Markets income increased 12% for the year. Much of this momentum stems from cross-border flows, digital market infrastructure, and the growing role of tokenized assets.
The bank has been one of the most vocal institutional proponents of real-world asset tokenization. Standard Chartered and its research team have projected that tokenized RWAs, excluding stablecoins, could reach $2 trillion by 2028, up from roughly $35 billion in late 2025, per reporting by The Block. Money market funds and listed equities are expected to account for roughly $750 billion each of that total, with private equity, corporate bonds, real estate, and commodities making up the rest.
The pitch for tokenization from a client perspective comes down to efficiency and cost. Traditional settlement cycles, manual reconciliation, and cross-border friction all add cost. Blockchain-based settlement; instant, programmable, and transparent, cuts those costs directly. For Standard Chartered’s institutional clients operating across its 54-market network, the value proposition is real: faster settlement, reduced counterparty risk, and access to assets that were previously illiquid or difficult to trade.
The bank has also made $157 billion in sustainable finance mobilization since 2021, and delivered $1.07 billion in sustainable finance income in 2025, hitting a target it had set for itself years earlier. These numbers matter because they confirm Standard Chartered is not just talking about new asset classes; it is generating revenue from them.
Geoff Kendrick’s Bold Crypto Forecasts Shape the Narrative
If there’s one person doing more than anyone to put Standard Chartered on the institutional crypto map, it’s Geoff Kendrick, the bank’s Global Head of Digital Assets Research.
In April 2023, when Bitcoin was trading at $25,000, Kendrick called the crypto winter over and forecasted Bitcoin reaching $100,000 by end-2024. It hit that level. In April 2025, he projected the stablecoin market to grow to $2 trillion by end-2028, a forecast that U.S. Treasury officials subsequently adopted as their own baseline, according to conference presentations and public records. His Ethereum price research, which we referenced in our earlier article on Standard Chartered’s digital asset leadership, drew wide attention when he called for ETH to reach $7,500 in 2025, citing the impact of the stablecoin boom on Ethereum network fees.
Most recently, in February 2026, Kendrick recalibrated. With Bitcoin having dropped nearly 50% from its October 2025 all-time high of approximately $126,000, and ETF investors sitting on losses rather than adding exposure, Kendrick told CoinDesk he sees Bitcoin potentially bottoming near $50,000 and Ether near $1,400, before a recovery through the rest of 2026. End-of-year targets now stand at $100,000 for BTC and $4,000 for ETH. His long-term $500,000 Bitcoin target remains, just pushed to 2030.
Bill Winters’ Transformation Delivers Record Shareholder Returns
Bill Winters joined Standard Chartered in June 2015 and spent much of his first several years managing a difficult legacy: underperforming markets, a depressed share price, and a bank that needed structural transformation. The share price sat near £10 when he arrived. This past year, it hit a ten-year high.
The 2025 numbers tell the story: underlying profit before tax of $7.9 billion, up 18%. Underlying earnings per share of 229.7 cents, up 37%. Affluent AUM growth of 14%, reaching $447 billion. Wealth Solutions income up 24%, with a record $52 billion in net new money. Total shareholder distributions since the start of 2024 exceeded $9.1 billion, ahead of the bank’s own three-year target of at least $8 billion.
Winters called this a transformation from a broad-based commercial bank into “a focused, structurally more profitable, and distinctly positioned international institution.” His words. The numbers support the claim.
The next milestone is a Capital Markets event in May 2026, where the bank will lay out its next phase of growth. Given what’s already in motion, the B2C2 digital asset infrastructure play, the Qubitra quantum venture, the tokenization push, and an institutional crypto research capability that is genuinely respected across markets, there is real substance behind the momentum.
Standard Chartered is not the loudest voice in banking. But in the fast-moving intersection of blockchain, institutional digital assets, and quantum-enabled finance, it is building faster and more coherently than almost any other GSIB. That’s a competitive advantage, and one that 2026 is starting to make very visible.
Author: Ayanfe Fakunle
The editorial team at #DisruptionBanking has taken all precautions to ensure that no persons or organizations have been adversely affected or offered any sort of financial advice in this article. This article is most definitely not financial advice.
See Also:
How Standard Chartered Became a Leader in Digital Assets | Disruption Banking
