Strategy CEO Lifts The Curtain On Bitcoin Talks With Largest US Banks

Strategy CEO Phong Le has been on the road with Michael Saylor, and the message from the meetings is less about “orange-pilling” bankers than watching large institutions sprint to close a Bitcoin product gap they can no longer ignore.

In a Dec. 23 interview with CoinStories host Nathalie Brunell, Le said the conversations start with the most basic building blocks, custody and exchange because banks have already watched meaningful flows move to crypto-native and quasi-crypto incumbents.

“They’re all trying to catch up with just the base of custodying Bitcoin and providing exchange services,” Le said. “They’ve seen, for example, Coinbase or Fidelity, and what they’re doing. And they want to be able to offer their customers native services with BTC so they don’t take the money off the platform out to somewhere else.”

Large US Banks Begin Bitcoin Conversations

Le described this baseline in familiar banking language, positioning BTC as an account-type object inside existing distribution rather than an external asset clients self-custody elsewhere. “So I’ll just start that as a baseline. I call it a checking account and a savings account for Bitcoin, right?” he said. “And then on top of that, what do they want to do?”

His answer was a laddered product roadmap that increasingly resembles the capital-markets “stack” Strategy has spent the last several years industrializing: credit, yield, structured exposure, and eventually something close to money-like instruments backed by BTC collateral.

“Then they want to offer things like the coin lending, which means you get loans against Bitcoin,” Le said. “And we know a lot of folks are doing that on a one-to-one private loan basis, but they should provide it in general. Perhaps offering instruments that give you yield off of Bitcoin. That will be the next sort of step above that.”

From there, Le said, banks start converging on Strategy’s own playbook, not necessarily copying it line-by-line, but arriving at the same conclusion that Bitcoin can be used as balance-sheet collateral to manufacture investable products.

“And then a set of Bitcoin-backed products, not too much different than what we do,” he said. “An investment bank would want to be able to underwrite Bitcoin-backed securities like MSTR or like any of our preferreds. That would be the next step.”

The “underwrite” comment is the tell. This is not merely about giving wealth clients a custody button. It is about turning exposure into fundable, tradable paper that sits comfortably inside existing bank distribution: preferreds, structured notes, and credit instruments that look like what clients already buy, just with BTC as the collateral story.

Le then moved into what he called “digital credit,” explicitly tying it to preferred-style issuance and bank-native variants of the same idea.

“And then you get into offering digital credit, right? Which would be our preferreds or a bank preferred based off of Bitcoin,” he said. “And then the last thing, which is what Mike talked about at Bitcoin in the Middle East, which is digital money, right? How do you give somebody essentially access to something that looks like money backed by Bitcoin that gives them a steady yield that’s better than what they would get otherwise called eight, nine percent?”

That “digital money” framing is aligned with what Saylor has been signaling on stage: BTC as collateral that can support a broader credit superstructure. At Bitcoin MENA 2025 in Abu Dhabi, Saylor argued the shift is already underway and, in his telling, the largest names in US finance are no longer keeping their distance, as Bitcoinist reported.

“In the past six months I have noted and been approached by BNY Mellon, by Wells Fargo, by Bank of America, by Charles Schwab, by JP Morgan, by Citi,” Saylor said. “They are all starting to issue credit against either Bitcoin or against derivatives like IBIT.”

At press time, BTC traded at