Ramp, the $60 billion corporate card company, applies for an OCC trust charter to custody crypto

Ramp, the New York corporate card and spend-management company valued at $60 billion, has asked the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) for a national trust bank charter. It filed the application on Friday 16 October 2026 for an entity to be called Ramp National Trust Bank and announced it on X on Monday 19 October, PYMNTS reported. If the OCC approves, the trust bank would offer fiduciary investment management and custody of digital assets.

This is not Ramp Network, the crypto on-ramp. It is the fintech founded seven years ago by Eric Glyman and Karim Atiyeh, which sells cards, bill payments and finance software to companies.

The filing lands at an awkward moment for the regulator. Two weeks earlier, on 2 October, the Independent Community Bankers of America (ICBA) sued the OCC in federal court to stop exactly this kind of charter from being handed to crypto and payment firms. Ramp is now one more name in a long queue of applicants, most of them crypto firms.

What Ramp’s OCC trust charter would allow, and what it would not

Ramp has published no application text beyond its X post, which was relayed by several outlets. According to PYMNTS, Ramp wrote that the trust bank would bring these services under a “consistent federal regulatory framework” and help it build products alongside its banking partners. It added: “It will not take deposits or make commercial loans.”

A national trust bank is a limited-purpose charter. It can hold assets for clients and act as a fiduciary under OCC supervision, but it is not a full bank, it does not take insured deposits and its customers get no FDIC cover.

Ramp already offers business accounts and a treasury product through partner banks, according to its own website. Investing.com read the move as a way to extend that treasury offering into institutional custody and to simplify compliance across state lines; that is the outlet’s interpretation, not a statement from Ramp.

Several things are still unknown as of 20 October. Ramp has not said which digital assets it would hold (bitcoin, stablecoins or tokenised funds), whether custody would be offered only to its own customers, how much capital it would put in or who would run the bank. The OCC has given no timeline. The regulator said on 11 August that it had received 40 de novo applications over the previous 18 months, national trust banks included, PYMNTS noted.

A $60 billion card company, not a crypto exchange

Ramp’s size is what sets this application apart. In a blog post on 15 October, Glyman and Atiyeh said the company serves 85,000 businesses and has reached $2 billion in annualised revenue. Bloomberg reported on 9 October that Ramp was valued at $60 billion after raising $1.85 billion, up from a $44 billion valuation in a June round of $750 million.

Most of the firms in the charter queue below are crypto businesses: stablecoin issuers, exchanges and custodians. Ramp sells cards and expense software to finance teams. Its application, like those of Modern Treasury earlier this month and Stripe’s Bridge before it, shows payment and finance software companies now seeking the same federal custody licence as crypto natives.

Community banks sued the OCC over trust charters on 2 October

The ICBA filed its lawsuit on 2 October 2026 in the US District Court for the District of Columbia, under the Administrative Procedure Act, against the OCC and Comptroller Jonathan Gould. It asks the court to declare unlawful the OCC’s final rule of 2 March 2026, which lets national trust banks carry out non-fiduciary activities, and Interpretive Letter 1176, a 2021 letter issued by Gould. It also asks the court to vacate the conditional charter granted to Protego Holdings in February.

The core argument is legal. ICBA says the National Bank Act does not allow trust banks that are neither deposit-takers nor real fiduciaries, and that crypto firms get the credibility of a federal charter without Community Reinvestment Act duties, consolidated supervision, capital and liquidity standards or FDIC insurance.

“Congress did not create the national trust charter as a side door into the banking system for crypto firms,” ICBA president and CEO Rebeca Romero Rainey said in the group’s release.

The complaint also puts a number on the competition. Two unnamed community banks, each with less than $2.5 billion in assets, spend about $1.5 million a year on regulatory requirements and have each lost hundreds of thousands of dollars of business this year to crypto firms holding conditional charters, Banking Dive reported from the filing.

The OCC told Banking Dive it does not comment on litigation. Gould has defended a more open approach before: at a Semafor event in May he said “we don’t have a zero risk tolerance anymore.” Ji Hun Kim, CEO of the Crypto Council for Innovation, called the suit “a clear attempt to resist national trust charters, payments innovation, and competition in financial services.”

Earlier pushback: a pause request, objection letters and Senator Warren

The lawsuit follows a year of objections. ICBA opposed the first approvals in December 2025 and, on 2 February 2026, asked the OCC to pause decisions on pending applications from Coinbase, Bridge, Ripple, World Liberty Trust and others until its rulemaking was final.

ICBA has also objected to single applications, Zerohash’s among them in April 2026. The Bank Policy Institute, which speaks for large banks, has stayed out of court so far. In October 2025 it accused applicants of “not planning to operate genuine trust companies,” Banking Dive reported. No BPI lawsuit has been reported.

In Congress, Senator Elizabeth Warren wrote to Gould on 18 May 2026 that the charters granted to nine crypto-focused firms, from Coinbase and Circle to Stripe and Protego, went beyond what the law allows, Decrypt reported. She asked for details of the approvals and for any correspondence between OCC officials and President Trump, his family or associates about crypto trust applications. At a February hearing she had told Gould, about World Liberty’s application: “If you follow the law, you will reject the President’s application.”

Ramp joins a national trust bank charter queue led by crypto firms

The table below lists the trust charter decisions and filings with a public date. Status is as of 20 October 2026. A conditional approval means the firm must still meet pre-opening conditions, such as capital and board requirements, before it can start business.

Sources: Decrypt, CoinDesk and Axios for the December approvals; The Block and Crowdfund Insider for Circle; Banking Dive for Crypto.com and Bridge; ICBA’s complaint for Protego; Banking Dive and the OCC’s announcement for World Liberty; Yahoo Finance for Coinbase; company releases for Rain, Modern Treasury and Ramp.

How many charters has the OCC granted in total? ICBA’s complaint says that during President Trump’s second term the regulator has “approved or conditionally approved 21 national trust bank charters, with 13 of those for crypto companies.” Other outlets give different tallies, and the OCC has not published a single list, so the ICBA figure is the lobby group’s own count.

Circle is the only firm in the table reported to hold final approval. Its trust bank will start with custody for Circle and its affiliates, with management of the USDC reserve left for later, The Block reported, and readers can see how that fits its business in our profile of Circle and USDC. Coinbase, whose conditional approval came in April, is covered in our Coinbase review.

Conditions can be heavy. For World Liberty Trust, the OCC required at least $20 million of tier 1 capital, half of it or $10 million (whichever is greater) in liquid assets, and 180 days of operating expenses, Banking Dive reported on 17 August.

What a national trust charter gives a fintech

For a company like Ramp, the appeal is one federal licence instead of a patchwork of state trust and money-transmission licences. The OCC supervises the trust bank directly, and a national charter generally lets it operate across states under federal rules; ICBA’s complaint objects to this preemption of state consumer rules.

The trade-off is scope. Without deposits or loans, a trust bank cannot do what a commercial bank does with client cash. It can hold assets in custody, manage them as a fiduciary and, since the March 2026 rule, carry out some non-fiduciary activities, which is the part ICBA wants struck down. If the court sides with ICBA, the business model of several pending applicants could narrow. For the wider picture of how US crypto rules are being written while Congress stalls, see our explainer on the SEC and CFTC after the CLARITY Act.

AnchorWatch opens a Nevada trust company for bitcoin custody

A smaller custody launch on the same day shows the state-charter route. AnchorWatch Trust Company, a Nevada state-chartered trust company, opened for business on Monday 19 October as a qualified custodian for bitcoin, according to the company. The Nevada Financial Institutions Division authorised it to act as a custodian, Bitcoin Magazine reported. Coindaro did not find a notice from the Nevada regulator, so the details below come from the company.

The pricing is the unusual part. AnchorWatch charges fixed-dollar fees tiered by vault size, with a cap of $10,000 a month, according to the company, instead of the percentage of assets most custodians charge. Once a client hits the cap, buying more bitcoin or a rising price does not raise the fee. The company claims large holders could save “six- or seven-figure” amounts a year. Its release describes the fees as monthly in one passage and annual in another.

Clients can choose between two models. In Flagship Custody, the trust company holds the keys required for qualified custody and the client’s trustees or executives hold others. In multi-institution custody, keys are split between AnchorWatch, BitGo in the United States and CoinCorner in the Isle of Man.

Optional insurance, issued by AnchorWatch as a Lloyd’s coverholder and backed by A+ rated Lloyd’s syndicates, goes up to $370 million per client, according to the company. It covers perils such as violent coercion and kidnapping and fraud by AnchorWatch itself, is subject to underwriting, and is open only to US-domiciled companies and US-resident individuals. AnchorWatch targets fiduciaries, public companies holding bitcoin, trusts and wealthy individuals.

Ramp and AnchorWatch sell the same idea, regulated custody, under different regimes: one asks Washington for a federal charter, the other holds a Nevada one.

For EU readers: MiCA uses a CASP licence instead

There is no trust charter route in the European Union. Under the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA), a firm that holds crypto for clients needs authorisation as a crypto-asset service provider, or CASP. Custody and administration of crypto-assets on behalf of clients is one of the services the regulation lists.

The licence is granted by a national authority, such as the AMF in France or Consob in Italy, and can then be passported to other member states after notification. Banks can offer the same services under their existing licence after notifying their supervisor; Deutsche Bank’s entry in the register is a recent example, covered in our piece on its custody plans. Ramp’s application changes nothing for EU customers today.

What happens next for Ramp’s application

The OCC has not said when it will rule. Once it publishes an application, a public comment period opens, and groups such as ICBA and BPI have used it to file objections against other applicants. Whether they will do so for Ramp is not yet known.

The bigger date is in court. The ICBA case is at an early stage, and no hearing on a preliminary injunction has been reported. A ruling against the March 2026 rule would affect every pending trust application, Ramp’s included, while a ruling for the OCC would leave the door open for more fintechs to follow.