Sony Bank’s Connectia Trust would issue dollar-pegged stablecoins under a US national trust charter — the same path Circle, Ripple and Paxos took in a fast-growing wave of OCC approvals — over the objections of US banking trade groups.
Posted July 9, 2026 at 6:32 pm EST.
Sony Bank has won conditional approval from the US Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) to set up a national trust bank that would issue dollar-pegged stablecoins, marking Sony Financial Group’s entry into the US stablecoin market.
The subsidiary — Connectia Trust, National Association — will be wholly owned by Sony Bank, part of Sony Financial Group, and capitalized at $40 million, Sony said in a disclosure reported this week by Banking Dive and PYMNTS. The trust is being set up “in preparation for the commercialization of businesses related to the issuance and management of U.S. dollar-denominated stablecoins in the United States,” Sony said in the announcement. Formation is slated for this month, but Connectia is not expected to begin commercial operations until 2027. The filing did not name any specific products, or say whether Connectia would serve retail or institutional customers.
The plan points the charter at Sony’s own entertainment empire. Japan’s Nikkei reported last year that Sony expected US customers who play its video games and consume its other content to use stablecoins to pay for subscriptions, giving the company a way to offset the fees it pays credit-card networks. The trust is “intended to contribute to the development of a medium to long-term business foundation for the Sony Financial Group’s digital asset businesses,” Sony said in the announcement.
Connectia joins a fast-growing line of firms seeking national trust charters under OCC chief Jonathan Gould. Circle, Ripple and Paxos were among the first wave of approvals in December, and large banks such as Morgan Stanley have pursued charters of their own. The structure has become the emerging federal path for stablecoin issuers under the GENIUS Act, the federal law that created a framework for permitted payment stablecoins; in June, FinCEN and federal banking regulators proposed customer-identification rules for issuers under it.
The approval is conditional, and it did not arrive unopposed. When Sony’s application went public in October, banking trade groups and consumer advocates pushed back. The Bank Policy Institute said in a comment letter that the application “raises questions regarding the longstanding … separation of banking and commerce.” The Independent Community Bankers of America warned in a November letter that the OCC’s receivership framework was “wholly unequipped to resolve an uninsured, systemically significant stablecoin issuer” like Connectia. And approval would create “a two-tier system where digital asset firms receive comparable federal status without comparable public obligations,” the National Community Reinvestment Coalition wrote in its own letter.
The venture’s structure is unusual, analysts note. Roman Goldstein, a senior director at advisory firm Klaros Group, called the venture the “first commercial-conglomerate ecosystem bank” and flagged its cross-border structure — the OCC supervises the trust while Japan’s Financial Services Agency oversees the parent. “A foreign-owned bank with no Fed in the picture,” Goldstein wrote in a LinkedIn post. On the substance, the “OCC didn’t dodge the banking-and-commerce objections, it just said that law permits this integration,” Goldstein wrote in the post.
Before it can open, Connectia must satisfy the OCC’s pre-opening conditions, and Goldstein noted the regulator signalled it may at any point require the subsidiary to install a dedicated, full-time chief financial officer.
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AI-assisted content: This article was produced with the assistance of AI tools and was reviewed, edited, and fact-checked by a member of the Unchained editorial team before publication.