Modern Treasury applied to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency on October 5, 2026 for a limited-purpose national trust bank charter that would custody stablecoins and related fiat for its corporate customers. The San Francisco payments infrastructure firm filed under the proposed entity name Modern Treasury National Trust Bank.

National trust bank charters issued by the OCC authorize firms to perform fiduciary and custody functions under direct federal supervision while prohibiting deposit-taking, lending, and FDIC insurance. A limited-purpose designation narrows the permissible activity set further, restricting the entity to custody and adjacent fiduciary work.

What the charter actually permits

The application asks the OCC to authorize a tightly defined set of activities. The proposed trust bank would custody digital assets, including stablecoins, and offer related fiat services to the same customer base.

The scope excludes two activities that sit at the center of most crypto-bank policy debates:

• Lending against digital asset holdings
• Issuing stablecoins against reserves

That combination is designed to let a corporate client manage both tokenized dollars and traditional bank balances through a single federally supervised counterparty, without forcing Modern Treasury to become a stablecoin issuer itself.

Why the company filed now

The application follows Modern Treasury's October 2025 acquisition of Beam, a stablecoin payments startup that added digital dollar capabilities to the company's existing payments platform.

CEO and co-founder Matt Marcus tied the charter request directly to that integration work. "Stablecoins are foundational economic infrastructure for the future," Marcus said.

The trust bank would operate as a separate regulated entity from Modern Treasury's payments service provider business, which the company says continues to process hundreds of billions of dollars in transactions for its corporate client base. Holding the custody activity at arm's length is intended to insulate the PSP unit from the new regulatory exposure that comes with holding client digital assets.

Who else is in the OCC pipeline

Modern Treasury joins a queue of crypto and fintech firms that have approached the OCC for similar charters since late 2025. Circle, Paxos, and Ripple have all pursued national trust charters, with conditional approvals granted between 2025 and 2026.

Circle and Paxos are stablecoin issuers. Ripple operates a payments and crypto business. Modern Treasury enters from a different direction: a traditional payments infrastructure provider folding digital dollar custody into an existing product rather than a stablecoin issuer seeking a regulated home for its reserves.

What an approval would mean for clients

A signed-off charter would let a corporate customer hold stablecoins and fiat under one federally supervised roof, rather than stitching together a qualified custodian, a commercial bank, and a stablecoin issuer.

The decision to exclude lending and issuance keeps the trust bank's risk profile narrower than a full-service institution. It also keeps the firm on the infrastructure-only path that has shaped conditional OCC approvals over the past 18 months, a pattern that suggests regulators are more comfortable authorizing custody than authorizing issuance.

When a decision could arrive

The filing only initiates the OCC's review process. Modern Treasury cannot begin operating the trust bank until the agency grants the required approvals, and the company has not disclosed a target timeline for the application or any anticipated approval window.