Raiffeisen Bank International to Open Crypto Trading to 18 Million Customers
Raiffeisen Bank International (RBI) announced a partnership with crypto broker Bitpanda, allowing approximately 18 million customers in Central and Eastern Europe to purchase digital assets, with services rolling out in phases across its subsidiaries.
This is one of the first major initiatives announced by RBI's new CEO Michael Hoellerer. Previously, he served as the general manager of Raiffeisenlandesbank NÖ-Wien. In April 2023, he led the bank in signing a letter of intent with Bitpanda, planning to launch retail crypto trading in Vienna in early 2024, making RBI one of the first traditional banks in Europe to offer crypto investments to regular depositors. He stated that the partnership aims to add an "innovative and secure" component to the product line, enabling all customers to "easily accumulate wealth." This model has now been expanded from a regional bank in Austria to the entire RBI Group's Central and Eastern European network.
Headquartered in Vienna, RBI is one of the largest Western banking groups in Central and Eastern Europe, operating in markets including the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Albania, Kosovo, and Ukraine, with total assets of approximately $200 billion. According to the plan, crypto services will be gradually launched by each country's subsidiary based on local regulatory requirements, allowing customers to buy and sell digital assets directly within their existing mobile banking apps without needing to open separate exchange accounts. Bitpanda will provide the underlying trading, custody, and liquidity, while the bank will handle customer access and compliance checks.
Founded in 2014 and also headquartered in Vienna, Bitpanda was established by Eric Demuth and Paul Klanschek among others. In 2021, it completed a $263 million Series C funding round led by Valar Ventures, founded by Peter Thiel, with a valuation of approximately $4.1 billion. The platform offers over 650 digital assets and supports trading in stocks, ETFs, and precious metals, having obtained a license under the EU's Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA) to operate across the EU with a single license.
Bitpanda is shifting its focus from a consumer trading application to becoming an "infrastructure provider" for banks. It has already provided white-label crypto trading services to several financial institutions, including Germany's digital bank N26 and UAE's RAKBANK, with the number of institutional partners in Europe increasing from 9 in 2024 to 16 in 2025. In March 2026, it will launch its B2B brand "Bitpanda Enterprise," offering API investment interfaces, institutional-grade custody, trading liquidity, stablecoin payment channels, and tokenized asset infrastructure. Financially, Bitpanda expects adjusted revenues of €371 million in 2025, a 16% year-on-year increase; adjusted EBITDA is projected at €13 million, a 75% year-on-year decline, attributed to investments in products, compliance, and international expansion. Registered users have increased from 5.9 million to 7.4 million, a growth of 25%.
In the capital markets, Bitpanda is considering an IPO, reportedly leaning towards listing on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, with a target valuation of €4 billion to €5 billion. Signing a contract with a large banking group like RBI brings in 18 million potential user entries, far exceeding Bitpanda's own 7.4 million registered users, which will significantly enhance its valuation basis for the IPO.
In terms of market mechanisms, this is an expansion of distribution channels driven by the partnership agreement. The buyers are retail banking customers in Central and Eastern Europe, who previously could only purchase crypto assets through offshore exchanges or local small platforms, but can now complete transactions within their familiar banking apps, with funds expected to flow back from offshore platforms to regulated banking channels. The primary beneficiary is Bitpanda, which gains a large user entry with low customer acquisition costs and earns a share of each transaction; RBI gains new fee income and retains young customers who would otherwise flow to crypto platforms. The pressure is on platforms like Binance and Revolut that compete directly for Central and Eastern European crypto customers, as well as local small and medium-sized banks that do not yet have crypto product lines.
Source: Public Information
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RBI has been in the midst of geopolitical risks in recent years. After the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, it became one of the largest Western banks in Russia, and the European Central Bank has repeatedly urged it to accelerate the reduction of its Russian operations. In 2023, the U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) inquired about its Russian business. In early 2025, a Russian court ordered RBI's Russian subsidiary to pay approximately €2 billion in a lawsuit involving Rasperia, leading RBI to set aside significant provisions. These pressures have made it urgent for RBI to find new growth points in its core Central and Eastern European markets. On the other hand, Hoellerer himself is one of the earliest executives in the Austrian cooperative banking system to promote crypto business, and this partnership continues his personal strategic path.
From a capital perspective, traditional European banks generally choose to "outsource crypto capabilities while retaining customer access." This is due to the Basel Committee's prudential standards for crypto assets: banks that directly hold unsecured crypto assets face a maximum risk weight of 1250%, resulting in extremely high capital requirements. Therefore, banks prefer to let licensed third parties handle custody and trading, earning commissions while serving as the access point. Consequently, Bitpanda has shifted its business model from "customer acquisition" to "selling infrastructure": launching its Enterprise business to connect with banks like N26, RAKBANK, and RBI, and after obtaining the MiCA license, it can serve all 27 EU countries with a single license. It has invested heavily in this expansion, which is also the reason for the significant decline in EBITDA; the IPO financing is intended to support this expansion path of initially losing money before becoming profitable.
Similar cases are emerging intensively in Europe. In 2025, Spain's BBVA opened Bitcoin and Ethereum trading to retail customers, and Santander's Openbank launched crypto trading in Germany; reports indicate that the German Savings Bank Group (Sparkassen) plans to offer crypto trading to approximately 50 million customers through DekaBank in 2026. In the U.S., Coinbase has long provided custody for institutions like BlackRock and is also offering crypto service interfaces for banks. The industry is currently in an expansion phase of "crypto assets entering the main banking channels," with the competitive focus shifting from attracting retail accounts to securing B2B partnership contracts with banks.
Essentially, this is a restructuring of the industry chain. In the previous cycle, the value chain of the crypto industry was "exchanges directly facing users," with platforms like Coinbase and Binance simultaneously controlling customer acquisition, trading, custody, and clearing. After the MiCA regulation comes into effect, the value chain is split into two segments: banks control customer relationships, deposits, and compliance identities, while licensed crypto service providers offer trading and custody. The mechanism is that unified regulation significantly reduces cross-border operational costs, while the capital rules for banks make them reluctant to hold crypto assets themselves, thus making the division of labor the optimal solution. The final result is that the flow of crypto trading access returns from independent exchanges to traditional banks, and the value of infrastructure providers like Bitpanda depends on how many banks' customer pools they can connect to.
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