Sony Bank received conditional approval from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency on July 6 to charter a national trust bank in the United States. The subsidiary, called Connectia Trust, will be capitalized at $40 million and headquartered in New York. Its stated purpose is issuing dollar-backed stablecoins, holding reserves, and providing custody services. Operations are targeted for 2027.
Sony Bank is a subsidiary of Sony Group Corporation, the company that makes the PlayStation, runs Crunchyroll, and distributes films through Sony Pictures. Connectia Trust will be wholly owned by Sony Bank. Sidley Austin served as legal counsel. A consumer electronics and entertainment conglomerate is becoming a federally regulated financial institution.
The Stripped Charter
A national trust bank charter does not authorize banking.
Banks take deposits and make loans. The spread between what they pay depositors and what they charge borrowers generates the profit. The entire regulatory apparatus of modern finance, from capital requirements to FDIC insurance to resolution planning, exists to manage the leverage that structure creates. Maturity transformation, borrowing short-term to fund long-term assets, is the mechanism that makes banking both essential and unstable.
The OCC's national trust bank charter strips all of this out. A trust bank can issue stablecoins, hold dollar reserves, custody digital assets, and manage fiduciary accounts. It cannot accept deposits. It cannot make loans. There is no leverage. No maturity mismatch. No FDIC insurance requirement. A stablecoin issuer holds dollars and issues tokens redeemable one-for-one. The token is a receipt for a dollar held in reserve. The revenue comes from yield on those reserves.
Eleven in Eighty-Three Days
Sony is the twelfth applicant since December 2025. The OCC conditionally approved five applications on December 12: Circle, Ripple, BitGo, Fidelity Digital Assets, and Paxos. Three more followed in February 2026: Bridge, Stripe's stablecoin subsidiary; Protego; and Crypto.com. Morgan Stanley, Payoneer, and Zerohash have also filed applications.
The applicants share almost nothing except the charter structure. Circle and Paxos are stablecoin issuers by origin. Fidelity and Morgan Stanley manage trillions in traditional assets. Stripe built a payments API. Crypto.com operates a retail exchange. Payoneer processes cross-border business payments. Sony makes video games and cameras. Four distinct industries, one federal charter. Each company wants the same narrow function: hold dollars, issue receipts, move money through its own rails.
The Closed Loop
The stablecoin market holds approximately $315 billion in total supply as of June 2026. Tether controls $186 billion at 59 percent dominance. Circle's USDC holds $75 billion at 24 percent. The top two issuers account for 83 percent. Bernstein projects the market will reach $420 billion by year-end. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has projected $2 trillion by 2028.
Sony's $40 million in initial capital is invisible against those figures. But PlayStation Network carries 125 million monthly active users and 47 million PlayStation Plus subscribers. The Game and Network Services division generated ¥4.69 trillion in revenue for the fiscal year ending March 2026, approximately $31 billion. Sony has stated the stablecoin will be used for games, anime, subscriptions, and digital content purchases across its properties.
The ambition reveals itself through the use case. Sony has no interest in competing with Tether for cryptocurrency settlement or with Circle for institutional dollar infrastructure. It wants to hold the money that 125 million users already spend on Sony products every month and route those payments through Sony's own financial rails. A customer relationship becomes a treasury relationship. The subscription payment becomes a float.
The Product
Every application in the OCC's queue tells the same structural story. A company with an installed base wants to hold its users' money and issue a digital receipt. The charter that enables this prohibits the two activities that define banking: taking deposits and making loans. No leverage, no maturity transformation, no systemic risk. The trust charter is the bank charter with banking removed. A PlayStation company, two investment banks, three crypto-native firms, a payments processor, and a fintech infrastructure company all concluded they need the same license. The product was never the bank. The product was the float.