Last week Germany’s dwpbank launched wpNex, a digital assets platform to support cryptocurrency and crypto-asset trading for its 1200 German banking clients. In turn, those banks represent 5.5 million retail customers, aiming to enable its partner banks to offer crypto-assets to end users.
Its first pilot transaction was for Bitcoin with MLP Banking. “The pilot project with dwpbank offers the opportunity to offer our customers trading in cryptocurrencies as a first step,” said Dr. Paul Utzat, Head of Account and Securities Processing at MLP Banking AG. “In our customer portal, it is so to speak, a logical addition to the existing wealth management offering.”
Dwpbank described trading in cryptocurrencies as the first component of its offering and is planning regulated trading of other digital assets.
“Regardless of how individual cryptocurrencies develop: Digitized values will become increasingly important in the future,” said Dr. Heiko Beck, CEO of dwpbank. “That’s why we’re expanding our range of services in this area and gearing our portfolio more closely to the future opportunities that are available here.”
Rather than purely building in-house, dwpbank adopted a partnership approach collaborating with Bankhaus Scheich/tradias for crypto trade execution and Tangany for digital asset custody. Both providers have BaFin licenses.
Tangany manages a wallet for dwpbank, which in turn provides accounts for retail customers, so they don’t have to hold private keys.
The pilot has been in the works since 2021.
Dwpbank has some past blockchain experience. It was involved in finledger, an institutional DLT project for promissory notes led by DZ Bank back in 2019. DZ Bank also recently unveiled its technology partner for its digital asset custody solution. More recently,dwpbank has been involved in pilots for Deutsche Börse’s D7 digital securities platform.
