Austria-based crypto investment business Bitpanda has partnered with Coinbase to enable European banks to offer crypto to their clients. Via the latest licensing deal, Bitpanda will allow Coinbase to bring regulated trading infrastructure services directly to banks outside the U.S.
JUST IN: #Coinbase and Bitpanda partner to enable European banks to offer cryptocurrency to their customers.
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Coinbase will also be added as a liquidity provider for Bitpanda Technology Solutions. This is essentially Bitpanda’s ‘investing-as-a-service’”’ arm. In turn, the platform will start using Coinbase Prime’s custody services.
Simplistically, the deal will help Coinbase’s institutional clients outside the U.S. to white-label Bitpanda’s investing-as-a-service platform. In fact, institutional clients of the platform can integrate trading infrastructure to start offering their customers trading, investment, and custody tools for assets including stocks and crypto.
Austrian bank Raiffeisenlandesbank, French fintech firm Lydia, German neobank N26, and the U.K.’s Plum are already using the service.
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Deal to help drive crypto adoption
Commenting on the essence of the latest deal, BitPanda COO Lukas Enzersdorfer-Konrad said in a recent interview,
“Coinbase has a liquidity venue with their exchange and they have the custody setup. But they don’t have the whole infrastructure middle layer that a partner can integrate and offer crypto traded and bought on Coinbase exchange and stored on Coinbase Custody to their end customers.”
Enzersdorfer-Konrad pointed out that even though last year’s crypto winter proved to be brutal, banks want to be in a position to offer crypto assets to customers. He also emphasized that such is especially the case in Europe, given that the MiCA regulatory framework has been adopted. He clarified that banks can see the data on their payment transactions. In fact, they can also view how much of their customers’ funds have been flowing out to crypto companies. He added,
“They understand how much business they are missing out on, and also how much more of their customer base would do that business, if they had enough trust in the process.”
Both companies intend to work together towards their goal of driving forward the adoption of digital assets around the world.
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