Survey: Most financial executives not planning to use bitcoin as corporate asset

Dive Brief:

Eighty-four percent of financial executives said this month that they do not plan to ever include bitcoin among their corporate assets, according to a Gartner survey.
Among the 77 respondents, only 5% said they plan to hold bitcoin as a corporate asset this year, Gartner said, noting the survey included 50 CFOs.
The volatility of bitcoin is the No. 1 concern among financial executives, with risk aversion of the company board, slow adoption of bitcoin in finance and regulatory concerns also discouraging acceptance of the cryptocurrency, Gartner said.

Dive Insight:

Bitcoin has gained high-profile adoption by some organizations this month and has surged more than 75% this year.

BlackRock Chief Investment Officer Rick Rieder said without elaborating on Feb. 17 the asset management company has started to "dabble" in bitcoin. BNY Mellon, the largest custody bank in the U.S., said on Feb. 11 that it will hold, transfer and issue cryptocurrencies on behalf of its asset-management clients.

Mastercard said on Feb. 10 that it would support certain digital assets on its network this year. Tesla said in a Feb. 8 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) it had bought $1.5 billion worth of bitcoin and plans to start accepting the cryptocurrency as a form of payment. And last spring JPMorgan Chase announced that it would extend banking services to cryptocurrency exchanges Gemini and Coinbase.

Still, "it's important to remember this is a nascent phenomenon in the long timeline of corporate assets," Alexander Bant, chief of research in the Gartner finance practice, said in a statement. "Finance leaders who are tasked with ensuring financial stability are not prone to making speculative leaps into unknown territory."

Among the 16% of survey respondents expressing willingness to adopt bitcoin as part of their financial strategy, 5% said they plan to hold the cryptocurrency this year, 1% plan their adoption in 2022 or 2023 and 9% are looking to 2024 or later, according to Gartner.

Half of the financial executives surveyed in the technology sector said they expect to hold bitcoin sometime in the future, while only 7% of respondents employed at private companies said they would ever use it, Gartner said.

Bitcoin rose above $52,000 on Feb. 17 and has gained more than 400% during the past 12 months.