Three years ago BBVA Switzerland became one of the first banks to offer cryptocurrency services to retail clients, with the launch of its New Gen digital investment account with no net worth requirements. However, customers have to keep the equivalent of $10,000 on deposit. Now BBVA Switzerland is expanding the offering by adding the USDC stablecoin from Circle.
In addition to the New Gen account, the Swiss bank also provides cryptocurrency services to its institutional and private banking clients.
Previously the BBVA offering only supported Bitcoin and Ether. While users can hold USDC with the bank, it also means institutional clients can use it for trading other cryptocurrencies.
We recently ran tests with a couple of cryptocurrency exchanges and noted that the exchange rates were surprisingly attractive. Thinking about BBVA clients, if they previously used their BBVA account to transfer money onto crypto exchanges, then BBVA can potentially earn foreign exchange revenues from converting CHF or Euro deposits into USDC.
“We want to offer our private clients a simple access to the tokenized products they are most interested in and cannot access through traditional financial institutions. Meanwhile, our institutional clients need us to provide options to guarantee the assets they manage,” said Philippe Meyer, Head of Digital Solutions and Blockchain at BBVA in Switzerland. “We will analyze all the crypto assets they are investing in to continue building our offering with further innovative solutions.”
Late last year BBVA Switzerland migrated its digital asset custody to Metaco’s Harmonize platform which is now owned by Ripple. In June BBVA’s Turkish arm, Garanti BBVA Digital Assets launched its wallet which currently supports trading of Bitcoin, Ether, USDC and Avax and custody of Chiliz, the coin linked to the Socios fan token platform.
