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Crypto banks, bank offerings and brokers

The first crypto banks

The step from start-up to bank was taken in August 2019. On 26 August of that year FINMA granted banking and securities dealer licences to two newly founded institutions, SEBA Crypto AG in Zug and Sygnum AG in Zurich, both of which served institutional and professional clients.1 They were among the first institutions worldwide to combine a full banking licence with a business model centred on crypto-assets and Digital Assets. They offered custody, trading, lending against crypto collateral and, somewhat later, staking and the tokenisation of assets for clients. Their licences were a signal to foreign institutions that Switzerland was prepared to integrate the new asset class into the prudentially supervised banking sector. The conditions attached to them, in particular the strict rules on transfers to external wallets discussed in section VIII, showed at the same time that integration came at the price of full compliance with banking standards.

SEBA had started operations in 2018 and obtained its licence in 2019. On 1 December 2023 it announced that it would change its name to AMINA Bank AG. At that time it operated from its head office in Zug, a branch in the Abu Dhabi Global Market regulated by the local Financial Services Regulatory Authority and a subsidiary in Hong Kong, with a further presence in Singapore.2 Sygnum took a different path. It developed a business-to-business platform through which other banks could offer crypto services to their own clients without building the technology and custody themselves. In January 2025 it completed a strategic growth round of 58 million dollars led by Fulgur Ventures, which valued it at one billion dollars.3

The best-known failure on the road to a banking licence was that of Bitcoin Suisse. In March 2021 FINMA informed the company that there were indications of weaknesses in its defences against money laundering, which made the grant of the licence it had applied for unlikely. After Bitcoin Suisse had withdrawn its application, FINMA terminated the procedure. The company remained outside prudential supervision, but it continued to be affiliated with a self-regulatory organisation for anti-money laundering purposes.4 The episode showed that FINMA expects the organisation and controls of a bank from every applicant, including firms with a pioneering role in Crypto Valley. It also made clear to the industry that a banking licence requires an anti-money laundering framework built before the application.

Established banks enter the market

For several years the large Swiss banks kept their distance from crypto-assets. Their caution had several causes: reputational concerns after the tax and money laundering scandals of the preceding decades, the absence of clear capital rules and the difficulty of integrating assets that are held by cryptographic keys into custody systems built for securities. The first established institution to offer trading was the online bank Swissquote, which in July 2017 enabled its clients to buy and sell bitcoin against euros and dollars through the exchange Bitstamp.5 Swissquote’s chief executive explained the choice of partner with Bitstamp’s focus on regulation and compliance.

The decisive broadening of the market came in 2024. On 20 February of that year PostFinance, the financial services arm of the Swiss Post with about 2.5 million clients, launched a crypto offering built on Sygnum’s platform. It started with eleven crypto-assets, including bitcoin and ether, and a minimum investment of fifty dollars. PostFinance’s chief investment officer explained that its clients wanted access to this market through their existing bank.6 In September 2024 the Zürcher Kantonalbank, the largest cantonal bank and a public-law institution owned by the canton of Zurich, followed with the trading and custody of bitcoin and ether for private clients through its e-banking and mobile banking. The bank held the private keys itself, so that its clients needed neither their own wallet nor any knowledge of key management. It also offered the service to other banks, among the first of which was the Thurgauer Kantonalbank.7

The entry of the Zürcher Kantonalbank and PostFinance marked a change in the status of crypto-assets in Switzerland. Two institutions with a public owner, a conservative clientele and a state guarantee or a close relationship to the Confederation now offered bitcoin to ordinary savers. The step would have been politically unthinkable a decade earlier. It was made possible by the clarification of the legal position of crypto custody in insolvency through the DLT Act of 2021, by FINMA’s guidance on the treatment of custody and staking and by the availability of specialised technology providers such as Sygnum, Taurus and Crypto Finance, which allowed banks to outsource parts of the infrastructure.

UBS, as the only remaining global bank in Switzerland, has concentrated on tokenisation for institutional clients. Through its unit UBS Tokenize it issued fully digital structured notes worth 200 million offshore renminbi in June 2023, took part in October 2023 in a pilot of a tokenised fund within the Singapore Project Guardian and carried out in November 2023 what it described as the first cross-border repurchase transaction with a natively issued digital bond on a public blockchain. On 1 November 2024 UBS Asset Management launched its first tokenised investment fund, the UBS USD Money Market Investment Fund Token, called uMINT, which was built on Ethereum.8 Several of these transactions took place in Asia, in particular within the Singapore framework, which reflects the competition between financial centres for tokenisation business described below.

Brokers, custodians and listed products

Alongside the banks, a group of specialised firms provides brokerage, custody and technology. Most of them are affiliated with a self-regulatory organisation under the Anti-Money Laundering Act or hold a licence as securities firm. The Lausanne custody technology provider Metaco, whose software was used by several large international banks, was acquired by the American company Ripple in May 2023 for 250 million dollars in cash and Ripple equity.9 The Geneva firm Taurus, which supplies custody and tokenisation technology to banks, raised 65 million dollars in February 2023 from investors including Deutsche Bank and later entered into a global partnership with that bank.10 The acquisition of Swiss technology firms by foreign groups, from Deutsche Börse’s stake in Crypto Finance to FalconX’s purchase of 21Shares, shows that the Swiss cluster has become a source of know-how for the international industry.

The most visible link between crypto-assets and the traditional capital market is the exchange-traded product. On 23 November 2018 SIX Swiss Exchange admitted what was described as the world’s first crypto index product on a regulated stock exchange, the HODL5 product of the Zug firm Amun, which had been established only in July of that year. Although the product was fully collateralised, as an exchange-traded product it did not qualify as a collective investment scheme subject to FINMA supervision.11 By the end of 2024 SIX listed 429 crypto products, including 169 crypto exchange-traded products on 54 different underlyings. Turnover in 2024 reached 4.5 billion francs in 242,883 trades, more than the two previous years combined. Bitcoin accounted for 51.6 per cent of turnover, ether for 13.7 per cent and Solana for 12.3 per cent. Seventy-eight per cent of turnover was traded in dollars, which SIX interpreted as a sign of growing institutional interest.12 For Swiss private banks these products have become the simplest way to give clients exposure to crypto-assets and Digital Assets within an ordinary securities account, without the operational questions of direct custody.

Notes

  1. FINMA, “FINMA publishes guidance on payments on the blockchain” (FINMA Guidance 02/2019), media release, 26 August 2019, https://www.finma.ch/en/news/2019/08/20190826-mm-kryptogwg/. ↩
  2. AMINA Bank, “SEBA Bank rebrands to AMINA Bank and continues to write its success story”, press release, December 2023, https://aminagroup.com/press/seba-bank-rebrands-to-amina-bank-and-continues-to-write-its-success-story/. The chief executive Franz Bergmueller described the rebrand as the start of a new era. ↩
  3. CoinDesk, “Crypto Bank Sygnum Gets Unicorn Status With $58M Round”, 14 January 2025, https://www.coindesk.com/business/2025/01/14/crypto-bank-sygnum-gets-unicorn-status-with-58-m-round. ↩
  4. FINMA, “FINMA issues negative prognosis for licensing procedure of Bitcoin Suisse AG”, media release, 17 March 2021, https://www.finma.ch/en/news/2021/03/20210317-mm-btcs/. ↩
  5. CoinDesk, “Online Bank Swissquote Partners With Bitstamp to Launch Bitcoin Trading”, 14 July 2017, https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2017/07/14/online-bank-swissquote-partners-with-bitstamp-to-launch-bitcoin-trading. ↩
  6. Sygnum, “PostFinance launches a crypto offering for 2.5 million customers, partnering with Sygnum Bank”, 20 February 2024, https://www.sygnum.com/news/postfinance-launches-crypto-partnering-with-sygnum/. ↩
  7. Zürcher Handelskammer, “ZKB bietet neu Kryptohandel an”, September 2024, https://www.zhk.ch/de/wirtschaft-und-politik/news/zkb-bietet-neu-kryptohandel-an.html. ↩
  8. UBS, “UBS Asset Management launches its first tokenized investment fund”, media release, 1 November 2024, https://www.ubs.com/global/en/media/display-page-ndp/en-20241101-first-tokenized-investment-fund.html. ↩
  9. TechCrunch, “Ripple acquires crypto custody startup Metaco for $250 million”, 17 May 2023, https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/17/ripple-acquires-crypto-custody-startup-metaco-for-250-million/. ↩
  10. The Block, “Swiss fintech firm Taurus granted approval to offer tokenized securities to retail clients”, 23 January 2024, https://www.theblock.co/news/regulation/2024-01-23-deutsche-bank-backed-taurus-granted-finma-approval-retail-tokenized-asset-trading-273983. ↩
  11. Finadium, “SIX hosts world’s first crypto index ETP listing by Amun”, November 2018, https://finadium.com/six-hosts-worlds-first-crypto-index-etp-listing-by-amun/. ↩
  12. SIX, “Crypto Market Thrives with Outstanding ETP Performance at SIX Swiss Exchange”, January 2025, https://www.six-group.com/en/newsroom/news/the-swiss-stock-exchange/2025/crypto-products-2024.html. SIX attributes its position to early regulatory clarity and to an extension of the admissible underlyings in April 2024. ↩

For general information only. This article does not constitute legal or tax advice, does not replace advice on an individual case and creates no lawyer-client relationship. It reflects the legal position as of September 2025.

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