Grupo Santander’s digital bank, Openbank, is growing in Europe and has started offering crypto services in Germany.
On Tuesday, the bank said that German customers can now buy, sell, and store Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH), Litecoin (LTC), Polygon (POL), and Cardano (ADA) directly on its platform.
The new service brings crypto into Openbank’s existing investment products, so customers don’t need to use other apps or exchanges. It also runs under the EU’s Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) regulation.
The bank plans to launch crypto trading in Spain in the coming weeks, with more tokens and features like crypto-to-crypto swaps.
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Coty de Monteverde, Santander’s head of crypto, said the bank added this option because customers are asking for it.
Santander has been looking at the stablecoin market, considering new crypto services for regular customers and even the possible launch of tokens tied to the U.S. dollar and the euro.
The bank is one of Europe’s biggest banks, with over 175 million customers in more than 40 countries, according to its website. Its digital arm, Openbank, has more than 2 million clients in Spain, Germany, Portugal, the Netherlands, the US, and Mexico.
German Banks Step Into Crypto
One of the first big players was DZ Bank, Germany’s second-largest lender. In September 2024, it started a crypto pilot program across 700 cooperative banks using Börse Stuttgart Digital’s technology.
Later, in July 2025, Deutsche Bank, Germany’s largest lender, announced that it will launch a digital asset custody service in 2026. The project is being developed together with Austria’s Bitpanda and Swiss tech company Taurus, building on plans first introduced back in 2020.
In the same month, Sparkassen-Finanzgruppe, one of Germany’s biggest banking groups, plans to let its 50 million customers trade cryptocurrencies starting next year.
