BBVA
BBVA, short for Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria, is a Spanish banking group with more than 80 million customers and its largest businesses in Spain, Mexico, Türkiye and South America. The group offers accounts, loans, cards and investments to private customers and finances companies through its Corporate & Investment Banking unit.
According to BBVA, 66 percent of its new customers join through digital channels, and 79 percent of its sales happen there. In June 2025 BBVA opened a fully digital bank in Germany from Frankfurt, its second in Europe after Italy, and in Spain its app lets customers buy and hold bitcoin and ether.
BBVA in Germany: digital bank in Frankfurt
BBVA launched its digital bank in Germany on 26 June 2025 from Frankfurt, after the group had worked in Germany only through Corporate & Investment Banking. The launch offer was a current account without fees that paid interest, together with a debit card with cashback, both opened and used in the app.
Customers in Germany bank with the German branch of the Spanish bank, which has its office at Neue Mainzer Straße 28 in Frankfurt. Besides the current account, the German branch offers instant access savings and fixed-term deposits. Murat Kalkan is Head of Digital Banks at BBVA and oversees the digital banks in Italy and Germany.
Deposit protection and supervision
BBVA is a Spanish credit institution, and its German branch belongs to the Spanish deposit guarantee scheme, the Fondo de Garantía de Depósitos de Entidades de Crédito. According to BBVA, deposits are protected up to 100,000 euros per customer. As one of the significant banks of the euro area, BBVA is supervised directly by the European Central Bank.
Bitcoin and ether in the BBVA app
On 10 March 2025 BBVA announced that it had completed the MiCA notification with the Spanish CNMV for custody and execution of crypto orders. Private customers in Spain buy, sell and hold bitcoin and ether in the BBVA app, a service that started with a small group and then opened to all private customers.
BBVA gives no investment advice on these coins, and every order is placed at the initiative of the customer. The service puts BBVA among the banks offering crypto to private customers in the EU.
Upcoming banking and fintech events in Frankfurt
Own key custody and Ripple technology
BBVA keeps the private keys for these coins on its own cryptographic key custody platform instead of using a third-party custodian. On 9 September 2025 Ripple announced that BBVA uses Ripple Custody, its custody software for banks, for this service in Spain, as The Block reported. BBVA stays the regulated custodian itself, and Ripple only supplies the software.
Switzerland and Türkiye
BBVA Switzerland has offered bitcoin custody and trading to all its private banking clients since June 2021 and added ether and the USDC stablecoin later. In Türkiye, Garanti BBVA set up its own company for crypto custody in 2023, which holds coins such as bitcoin, ether, USDC and Solana.
BBVA and Finance Loop
Employees of BBVA regularly attend Finance Loop events in Frankfurt and other cities. Digital banking belongs to the Payments & Digital Money track of Finance Loop, and bank custody of bitcoin and ether to the Investment & Digital Assets track.
Finance Loop is a professional network and has the goal of driving the institutional use of emerging technologies in finance, such as AI, digital payments, cloud and blockchain solutions. Finance Loop helps its members build skills and personal networks in these fields: Investment & Digital Assets, Payments & Digital Money, Digital Infrastructure & Sovereignty, and Risk & Compliance.