Spain’s second-largest financial institution, Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria (BBVA) will quickly allow prospects to purchase, promote and handle Bitcoin and Ethereum transactions through its app.
The service will initially be rolled out to “a small group of customers” and steadily prolonged to all of the financial institution’s non-public prospects in Spain over the approaching months.
The transfer follows BBVA satisfying all the necessities of the EU’s Markets in Crypto-Belongings Regulation (MiCA) and finishing the required formalities with the Spanish Securities and Alternate Fee (CNMV).
The financial institution didn’t point out when it plans to roll out the service for patrons aside from those that signed up for personal banking, which means the brand new options are solely related for individuals who can show they meet the financial institution’s wealth necessities, at the very least within the brief time period.
BBVA has supplied comparable companies in Switzerland since 2021, however once more solely to the group’s non-public banking prospects, and in Turkey (by means of its Garanti BBVA Kripto subsidiary) since January 2025.
Banks and crypto
Aside from Revolut, which has been providing crypto buying and selling to retail shoppers in lots of markets way back to 2017, it’s nonetheless pretty uncommon to see a mainstream financial institution provide crypto buying and selling for non-institutional shoppers. BBVA is among the many largest European banks by belongings.
Some banks already provide a mixture of crypto buying and selling and conventional banking companies, reminiscent of Switzerland’s Dukascopy Financial institution, however many, like Switzerland’s AMINA, model themselves explicitly as “crypto banks.”
However even when they’re not providing crypto buying and selling to their shoppers immediately, extra established historic European banks are providing crypto companies now that the introduction of MiCA has offered extra regulatory readability.
Final month, multinational financial institution Customary Chartered introduced a brand new entity primarily based in Luxembourg, providing crypto and digital asset custody companies within the European Union.
In the meantime, different recognizable European banks are making important Bitcoin purchases so as to add to their company treasuries. In January, Italy’s largest financial institution, Intesa Sanpaolo, bought 11 BTC price €1 million euros ($1 million), changing into the primary Italian financial institution to make a direct funding within the cryptocurrency.
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