Germany’s Biggest Bank Group Drops Its Crypto Ban, 230 Banks Queue Up

• Germany’s largest banking group has dropped its informal crypto ban on retail trading.
• The service is live at only a handful of savings banks for now.
• Most of the network has signalled interest, with a monthly rollout planned into next year.
• The group still calls crypto highly speculative and will not actively market it.

Germany’s Sparkassen-Finanzgruppe, the country’s largest banking group with about 50 million customers, ended its informal crypto ban on October 19, 2026, letting retail clients buy and sell cryptocurrencies inside its own banking app four years after its umbrella association advised member banks to stay away from the product. The service, called Krypto – powered by Deka and run by the group’s securities house DekaBank, is live at only five savings banks so far, yet more than 230 others have reportedly signalled interest, which would put crypto trading in front of most of the network by mid-2027 if the planned pace holds.

Four years from veto to app button

In June 2022 the German Savings Banks and Giro Association (DSGV), the umbrella body of the legally independent Sparkassen, recommended that its members not offer crypto trading to private clients, arguing that savings banks had a duty to shield customers from incalculable risks. The pressure to revisit that stance built up inside the group, and in spring 2025 Matthias Dießl, then head of the Bavarian savings banks association, said publicly that Sparkassen should give customers the option to trade crypto as well. The DSGV board reversed course a few weeks later and set summer 2026 as the target, a date that slipped after DekaBank ran an internal test with employees and their families in September before opening the service to regular customers this week.

One Deka license covers every savings bank

Joachim Schmalzl, a member of the DSGV executive board, told German news agency dpa on October 19 that the association had weighed carefully whether crypto fits its banking model, and he named two deciding factors: customer demand and a reliable European regulatory framework. The second refers to the EU’s Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA), which licenses crypto service providers under one rulebook valid across the bloc. In practice, DekaBank holds the authorization as a notified crypto-asset service provider, keeps custody of the coins and carries the compliance work centrally, so a regional savings bank that wants to offer crypto only has to activate the feature in its app instead of applying for a license of its own.

The demand argument has a commercial side as well. Until this week, a Sparkasse customer who wanted to own Bitcoin directly, not through an exchange-traded product, had to open an account at a neobroker such as Trade Republic or N26, or at a crypto exchange, moving part of their savings and trading habits outside the group. Marion Spielmann, COO for banking and custody services at DekaBank, said the bank wanted to keep the digital-asset value chain inside the Sparkassen group and make integration as easy as possible for member banks. That goal shaped the setup: DekaBank runs the customer-facing service and custody, while Boerse Stuttgart Digital, its partner on institutional crypto since 2024, supplies brokerage infrastructure and liquidity under an agreement expanded in October 2025.

Up to 40 new banks a month

Only customers of the five launch banks, Frankfurter Sparkasse, Sparkasse Rottal-Inn, Niederrheinische Sparkasse RheinLippe, Taunus Sparkasse and Sparkasse Karlsruhe, can trade today, because each savings bank decides independently whether and when to join. The DSGV expects 30 to 40 more institutions to go live every month and aims to connect a substantial share of the more than 230 interested banks during the first half of 2027, provided none of them drops out and the schedule holds better than the original summer 2026 target did.

Estimates based on the DSGV’s stated pace of 30 to 40 banks per month.

€0.99 per order, spread on top

Customers open a separate crypto account at DekaBank through the investment section of the app and can trade Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP, Solana and Polygon (POL) almost around the clock. Each purchase or sale costs €0.99 (about $1.14), and DekaBank also builds a variable spread, the gap between its buying and selling price, into every quote. On a €100 (about $115) purchase the fixed fee alone equals almost 1% before the spread, and the same charge applies again when the customer sells, which makes the product better suited to occasional larger purchases than to frequent small trades. Single orders are capped at €250,000 (around $288,000), and custody carries no separate fee.

Custody comes with conditions that experienced crypto users will notice quickly. DekaBank holds private keys in trust in a pooled omnibus wallet, customers cannot send coins to their own wallets, and withdrawals are limited to four approved providers: Crypto Finance Deutschland, Tangany, Börse Stuttgart Digital Custody and Bullish Europe. Germany’s statutory deposit insurance does not cover the holdings, the savings banks give no advice on individual coins, and the DSGV has said it will not actively promote the product, continuing to steer long-term savers toward securities savings plans.

Volksbanken got a head start

The Sparkassen are entering a market where their main rival network already has a head start. DZ Bank, the central institution of the Volksbanken and Raiffeisenbanken, received MiCAR authorization from Germany’s financial regulator BaFin for its meinKrypto platform at the end of December 2025, and each cooperative bank must file its own notification with the regulator before switching the service on.

The coin selection is where the two networks differ most. By adding XRP, Solana and Polygon, DekaBank gives three altcoins a regulated retail channel inside Germany’s largest banking group, while DZ Bank stayed with older names such as Litecoin and Cardano.

Wallet withdrawals remain the open question

The number of connected banks will make headlines each month, though on its own it says little about adoption. Account openings, trading volume in the app and how Deka’s spreads compare with specialised platforms once customers start checking quotes will show far more about real demand. DekaBank has also not said whether it will widen the five-coin list or allow transfers to personal wallets, and either change would affect how seriously experienced investors treat the offering.

The Sparkassen launch also lands in a week of wider movement across German banking. Deutsche Bank is reportedly preparing to start digital-asset custody within weeks, with stablecoins, tokenized deposits and an expansion into Asia planned for 2027. If that happens on schedule, savings banks, cooperative banks and Germany’s largest private lender would all be running some form of crypto service before the end of next year.