Germany’s largest federal-owned bank – Landesbank Baden-Württemberg (LBBW) – has partnered with Bitpanda Technology Solutions to offer crypto custody and trading services.

Within the new partnership, Bitpanda will provide LBBW with an “Investment-as-a-Service” infrastructure to enable crypto services for the bank’s corporate clients.

The initial offering includes custody and trading of Bitcoin, ETH and other crypto assets. The custody pilot will launch during the second half of 2024.

The partnership emerged due to the growing demand for crypto-related services among the bank’s institutional clients.

“The demand from our corporate customers for digital assets is increasing. We are convinced that crypto assets will establish themselves as a building block for further business models. With this cooperation, we are creating the technical and regulatory basis at an early stage to best support the individual crypto strategies of our corporate customers.”

Dr Jürgen Harengel, COO Corporate Bank at LBBW

LBBW is a universal bank and the main regional bank (Landesbank) for some Federal States of Germany. Since 2018, it has been the biggest state-backed landesbank lender in the country. Owned by several German savings banks, the state of Baden-Württemberg, and the city of Stuttgart, LBBW has total assets of about 330 billion euros.

The bank has been actively using distributed ledger technology (DLT) for years. Its biggest initiatives included the now-closed Marco Polo trade finance platform, backing DekaBank’s SWIAT tokenization platform. LBBW also was amongst the first to use the blockchain-based D7 digital securities platform by Deutsche B?rse.?

Landesbank Baden-Württemberg is not the only major bank in Germany that decided to offer crypto services. Earlier, Deutsche Bank announced it was going to offer its customers cryptocurrency custody options through the partnership with digital asset service provider Taurus. Crypto trading services are also facilitated by the German online bank N26. Besides, Deutsche B?rse has recently launched its own Digital Exchange (DBDX) regulated spot crypto asset trading platform targeted at institutional clients.