Ashok Vaswani revealed that the banking giant has met with Britain's Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) watchdog to talk about how to make bitcoin safe in response to a question about whether Barclays could support bitcoin.

"We have been talking to a couple of fintechs and have actually gone with the fintechs to the FCA to talk about how we could bring, the equivalent of bitcoin, not necessarily bitcoin, but cryptocurrencies into play," Vaswani told CNBC at the Money 20/20 fintech conference in Copenhagen, Denmark.

"Obviously (it's) a new area, obviously an area we've got to be careful with. We are working our way through it."