Bank chair compares crypto bout with feds to boxing match

“I got knocked down, embarrassed and hurt in the fifth round, and I consider life like different (boxing) rounds. But I can tell you I’m going to come out swinging in the sixth round,” Vast Bank Chairman Tom Biolchini said.

Biolchini made the remarks Wednesday at the University of Tulsa’s Friends of Finance speaker series. More than 300 people attended.

The bank’s move to shut down crypto came on the heels of a cease-and-desist order initiated against it by the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency in October.

Biolchini outlined in general terms how that office initially gave the green light to banks to offer cryptocurrency, only to change parameters following the last presidential election.

“The real version of the story I can’t really tell,” he said. “It’s called confidential supervisory information, and it’s certain communications with me and the (banking) regulators that I just can’t talk about. 

“If you heard the real story, you’d literally fall off your chair, and I’m not kidding.”

Vast Bank disabled and removed its crypto mobile banking application effective Jan. 31 after becoming the first bank in the U.S. to offer crypto services in 2021, he said.

The consent order says the lender engaged in unsafe and unsound practices linked to capital and strategic planning, project management, books and records, custody account controls and risk management for new products.

“The consent order is 30 pages long, and it makes no mention of crypto,” he said. “It just said we were this horrible bank.”

“There’s a reason — they gave us the legal right to do (crypto) two years earlier under a different administration. They can’t say it’s crypto or else they set themselves up for a lawsuit. So they have to say, ‘It’s because you’re a bad bank.'”

“I can’t tell you everything that they did,” he said. “But I will tell you they used every tool that they had, and within a period of … days, everything is fine, and now it’s not.

“I tried to negotiate … years of always doing the right thing, of fixing every problem. I get if you don’t like us in cryptocurrency. I get that, and we’ll back out.”

“Why did this happen? That’s the question. I don’t know.”

The Tulsa-based lender notified its customers that their digital assets would be liquidated and the accounts would be closed.

The good news, Biolchini said, “is that our bank is in very good condition,” adding that Vast has more liquidity than most banks in the state.

The federal government, he said, “they can make things happen to where it doesn’t become part of the mainstream.”

Biolchini served as 2023 chair of the Tulsa Regional Chamber of Commerce and was an attorney before joining Vast in 2008.

He earned his bachelor’s, master of business administration and law degrees from the University of Notre Dame, where he also boxed.

“Don’t be the person looking at the person who is fighting and criticizing and making fun of them or whatever. Get in the ring and fight … in whatever aspect of life you are working on,” he said.

“The federal government might try to crush Tulsa banking, but they cannot crush Tulsa’s spirits,” he said.

“I was blown away by the support that Vast Bank received during this trying time. I’m talking from competitor bankers — ‘What can we do? How can we help?'”

“You wonder why I love Tulsa, Oklahoma. It is my family and always will be, and I will be paying it forward back to Tulsans for the rest of my life because I’m so blown away with the generosity and the support I received from the Tulsa community.”