Landesbank Baden-Württemberg (LBBW), Germany’s leading federal lender, plans to launch crypto custody services for institutional clients in H2 2024.
Landesbank Baden-Württemberg, Germany’s largest federal bank, will start offering cryptocurrency custody services in cooperation with Austrian crypto exchange Bitpanda. This was revealed to Bloomberg by Jürgen Harengel, Managing Director of Corporate Banking at LBBW.
The service will tentatively become available in H2 2024.
Bitpanda Custody, an institutional custody solution, which is licensed by the U.K.’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and also involves the use of decentralized finance (DeFi), will be used for asset custody.
Jürgen Harengel said that providing a digital asset custody service is in response to growing demand from the bank’s corporate clients. According to Bloomberg, LBBW manages assets worth €333 billion.
Other major German banks are also working on providing crypto services, namely:
- in March 2023, processing giant Dwpbank, which provides securities processing for about 1,200 banks in Germany, announced the launch of the wpNex platform for Bitcoin trading;
- in June 2023, it was revealed that Deutsche Bank (DBK), Germany’s largest financial conglomerate, intends to obtain a license from the Federal Financial Supervisory Authority (BaFin) to hold cryptocurrencies;
- in November 2023, DZ Bank, Germany’s third-largest financial conglomerate by assets, launched a DLT digital asset platform targeting institutional clients.
It’s likely that such changes in digital asset adoption were made possible by a bill passed last March that regulates the digitization of the capital market in Germany, particularly the issuance of electronic securities on blockchains.
