Tuesday, 10 November 2026 10:00 AM
Product Announcements
Financial institutions can offer consumers self-custody digital asset wallets that are recovered through the consumers' own trusted institutions, not a seed phrase
DALLAS, TX / ACCESS Newswire / November 10, 2026 / BankSocial, the programmable financial infrastructure provider for banks and credit unions, today announced that it has delivered the first implementation of the Decentralized Recovery (DeRec) standard, the open-source protocol developed by the DeRec Alliance. Financial institution consumers using BankSocial's digital asset wallet can hold self-custody assets without writing down, storing, or ever seeing a seed phrase, and they can recover their wallet if they lose their phone.
Lost keys remain one of the biggest barriers to digital asset adoption. In a traditional self-custody wallet, the seed phrase is a single point of failure: if it's lost, the funds are gone, and if it's stolen, so are the funds. That leaves institutions an unappealing choice between taking custody of consumer assets themselves and asking consumers to carry that risk alone.
DeRec removes that tradeoff. The wallet's secret is encrypted and split into shares held by a group of trusted "helpers," and in BankSocial's implementation those helpers are financial institutions. No single helper can see or use the secret. When a consumer needs to recover, enough helpers return their shares for the consumer's own device, and only that device, to rebuild the wallet. The recovery phrase is generated, used, and erased inside an isolated, secure part of the app, and is never shown to the consumer at all.
Because DeRec protects any secret, not only a wallet key, the same standard works with any blockchain and can extend to other credentials an institution needs to protect for its consumers.
"Financial institutions have always been the institutions their consumers trust. DeRec lets them put that trust to work in digital assets, giving consumers the protection of their financial institution without giving up ownership of what they hold," said John Wingate, CEO of BankSocial.
"We built on an open standard because recovery is too important to be proprietary. DeRec gives us a security model anyone can inspect, with helpers from different organizations. No single company is in control, which provides robustness and security to the storage of any sensitive information," said Kevin Barnard, Chief Information Officer of BankSocial.
"Financial institutions adopting DeRec are taking a monumental step toward secure, user-friendly digital asset management. By protecting users from lost keys, while still preserving true self-custody, BankSocial is demonstrating how open standards can protect users and build enduring trust at scale," said Dr. Leemon Baird, Co-Founder of Hedera.
For financial institutions, the implementation means:
- No seed phrase support burden: consumers recover through their app instead of calling the branch about a lost seed phrase.
- Self-custody without custody risk: consumers own their assets, and no single party, including the institution, can access them.
- One standard for every chain and every secret: no wallet-by-wallet recovery schemes to support.
- An open, auditable standard backed by an industry alliance whose consumers include Hedera, Algorand and Ripple, instead of a proprietary black box.
Institutions interested in offering seedless self-custody to their consumers can request a briefing at banksocial.io.
About BankSocial®
BankSocial® (Fivancial™ Inc.) is a financial technology company helping community banks and credit unions deliver modern financial services and improve business operations through one connected platform. Its capabilities include AI-powered workflows, payments, digital lending, stocks and crypto investing, fraud prevention, and identity verification.
BankSocial connects with core and digital banking systems to help institutions expand their offerings, streamline work, and better serve customers and members. Institutions can use BankSocial's AI platform, Substrate™, independently or alongside its financial services capabilities.
Learn more at banksocial.io.
About the DeRec Alliance
The DeRec Alliance is a group of forward-thinking companies from across the Web2 and Web3 ecosystems that are committed to making the process of securing and recovering digital assets, and accounts. Leveraging a new open source standard, these organizations are working together to help their users and the broader world realize the promise of Web3, without the complexity.
Media contact
Joy Erickson
Marketing Coordinator
BankSocial
Email: [email protected]
Phone: 855-568-3275
Website: www.banksocial.io
SOURCE: BankSocial