UniCredit, Italy’s second-largest bank, is preparing a push into crypto services that would add custody, brokerage, tokenized investments and stablecoin features for clients, Bloomberg reported on Friday, citing people familiar with the matter. The Milan-based lender has started selecting a technology provider to hold digital assets and process client transactions, with talks still at an early stage and no final decision announced.
The bank has not named the providers it is weighing, how much it might spend, or when it would choose one. Services under discussion include crypto custody and brokerage, tokenized investment products and fixed-income securities, stablecoin applications for clients, and channels for cryptocurrency exposure. Any launch would fall under the EU’s Markets in Crypto-Assets regulation, whose transition period for existing providers ended on July 1.
What the bank is already doing
UniCredit is not starting from zero. Earlier this year it offered professional clients a structured product tied to BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF, with full principal protection against losses. Late last year it completed Italy’s first tokenized minibond issued on a public blockchain. On September 8 it bought a minority stake in VC Trade, a Frankfurt platform that digitizes bond and loan deals and has handled more than 90 billion euros across over 600 transactions.
The bank is also part of Qivalis, a company formed by European banks to issue a euro-denominated stablecoin. The project began with 10 lenders including UniCredit, BNP Paribas, ING, Danske Bank and Raiffeisen Bank International. In May it expanded to 37 banks across 15 countries, adding ABN AMRO, Rabobank, Nordea and Intesa Sanpaolo. Qivalis plans to operate as an electronic money institution supervised by the Dutch central bank and has targeted a launch in the second half of 2026, pending approval.
European banks catch up
UniCredit’s review fits a wider pattern across Europe. Spain’s BBVA now offers bitcoin trading and custody to all customers through its app, running its own custody infrastructure. Santander’s Openbank launched its own trading service. Deutsche Bank is building custody with technology from Bitpanda, and DZ Bank received BaFin approval in January for its meinKrypto platform. Cecabank, a Spanish custodian working with more than 100 financial institutions, went live with crypto custody in June through a partnership with Bit2Me.
MiCA is the common denominator. The regulation gives banks a legal definition of crypto assets, a supervisor, and a set of obligations they already know how to manage. Before it took effect, most large European lenders kept crypto at arm’s length, unsure how regulators would treat custody or trading. The grace period’s end in July pushed firms to either license up or exit.
Israel’s Bank Leumi has lined up Galaxy to run trading and custody for a planned 2027 launch covering bitcoin, ether and solana, showing the trend reaches beyond the EU. The competitive pressure is direct: a bank that offers custody keeps clients from moving assets to a specialized provider, and brokerage adds a trading fee stream that did not exist before.
What is still undecided
UniCredit has not said which client segments would get access first, whether retail, private banking or institutional. Large European lenders typically start with institutional custody before expanding to brokerage, but the bank has not confirmed any sequencing. A spokesperson declined to comment on the report, and no launch date or investment size has been disclosed.
The bank’s core markets include Italy, Germany, Austria and countries across Central and Eastern Europe. A rollout there would put any digital-asset offering in front of a customer base of more than 20 million clients and 34 billion euros in assets under management.
The economics matter too. Custody fees on crypto are thin compared with traditional securities custody, and tokenized bond issuance is still small in absolute terms. The case for building the infrastructure rests on keeping corporate and wealth clients inside the bank as they start asking for digital-asset access, not on near-term revenue from the products themselves.
There is also a regulatory asymmetry worth noting. Under MiCA, a bank that wants to custody client crypto needs a separate authorization on top of its banking license, and the requirements cover capital, segregation of client assets and operational resilience. Banks that already run complex treasury operations tend to clear these bars without much trouble, but the process still takes months and involves on-site inspections from the national supervisor.
The open question is timing. Qivalis still needs Dutch regulatory approval, and a bank-level custody platform usually takes a year or more to build even with an outside technology provider. If UniCredit commits, its first live crypto services would most likely arrive well after the stablecoin consortium’s planned launch.
For now, the bank’s move signals something simpler: one of Europe’s largest lenders by assets no longer treats crypto infrastructure as a side experiment. The structured bitcoin product, the tokenized minibond and the Qivalis stake all pointed the same way. Custody and brokerage would make it official.
The next signal to watch is a technology provider announcement. UniCredit has previously disclosed partnerships once contracts were signed, as it did with the VC Trade stake earlier this month. If a custody vendor is named before year-end, a 2027 service launch becomes realistic. If the review drags into next year without a named partner, the project risks joining the long list of bank crypto plans that never reached production.
Retail access would be the bigger step. Italian regulators have historically been cautious on consumer crypto marketing, and a bank selling bitcoin exposure to retail depositors would draw scrutiny from both MiCA authorities and consumer protection bodies. Institutional and corporate custody avoids most of that friction, which is why most analysts expect that to come first if anything launches at all.