Germany’s traditional banking establishment is about to do something that would have been unthinkable two years ago. The country’s sprawling Sparkassen savings bank network and its cooperative banking sector, led by DZ Bank, are preparing to let customers buy and sell crypto directly through the same mobile apps they use to check their checking accounts.
The Sparkassen-Finanzgruppe, which serves approximately 50 million retail clients, plans to launch Bitcoin and Ether trading through DekaBank’s securities platform by summer 2026. DZ Bank is moving even faster, with its “meinKrypto” platform already having secured MiCA authorization from Germany’s financial regulator BaFin. That platform is targeting a launch by end of 2025.
From “highly speculative” to “here’s the buy button”
As recently as 2023, the Sparkassen group officially labeled digital assets as “highly speculative” and actively avoided offering anything related to them. Now the German Savings Banks Association (DSGV) is talking about providing “reliable access to a regulated crypto offering.”
What changed? Customer demand, mostly. A September 2025 survey found that 71% of cooperative banks expressed interest in offering crypto services to private clients. That figure was 54% just the year prior, a 17-percentage-point jump that apparently made the message impossible to ignore.
