- Bakkt hopes the acquisition of critical assets in the firm will enhance its various operations
- Members of the RCG team have now joined Bakkt, and the entire transaction will be closed in February 2019
- Bakkt says the deal will also strengthen its AML/KYC procedures
Bakkt, a global cryptoassets network created by the owners of Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) who also owns the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), has announced the acquisition of some of the assets of Rosenthal Collins Group (RCG), a highly reputed independent futures commission merchant, to enhance its risk management operations and more, according to a Medium blog post on January 14, 2019.
Bakkt Acquires RCG’s Back Office Assets
As part of its move to build the world’s first integrated, institutional grade exchange-traded markets that is focused on bringing trust and utility to the cryptoassets world and make it possible for individuals, merchants and institutional investors to buy, sell, store and spend bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in a simple, safe and secure way, Bakkt has reportedly acquired the assets of Rosenthal Collins Group (RCG).
Launched by the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) in August 2018, Bakkt has made it clear that the acquisition of some of the back office assets of RCG, a century-old, futures brokerage based in Chicago would enhance a vast array of its operations including risk management and treasury, anti-money laundering (AML) and know your customer (KYC).
Commenting on the deal, the CEO of Bakkt, Kelly Loeffler reportedly told Fortune that:
“In most cases, when companies are combined you have an overlapping system, so we harnessed the opportunity in purchasing a portion of RCG’s back office operations, including compliance, treasury and risk management services as well as onboarding its team members.”
Not Standing Still in Its Quest to Take Cryptos to Mainstream Finance
With the deal scheduled to be finalized later in February this year, Bakkt says the move goes a long way to show it’s not standing still while awaiting the approval of the United States Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).
Though nascent, the Bakkt team has stated that distributed ledger technology (DLT) has enormous potentials to “contribute to a lean, modern transaction platform” that could work in a frictionless way with existing merchant systems, and as such it remains dedicated to promoting the widespread use of cryptoassets and blockchain technology.
Initially scheduled to go live in December 2018, the launch of the Bakkt physically-delivered Bitcoin Futures contracts has been pushed back to early 2019.
