dwpbank

The Deutsche WertpapierService Bank AG, dwpbank for short, processes securities transactions for German banks. It was founded in 2003 from the merger of bws bank and WPS Bank, and its head office is in Eschborn next to Frankfurt. According to its company page, around 1,000 institutions use dwpbank as their outsourcing partner for securities services: 309 Sparkassen and four Landesbanken, DZ BANK with its 692 affiliated cooperative banks, and 17 private and commercial banks.

dwpbank's clients are banks. The private investor deals with the bank, and dwpbank does the processing in the background. In 2025 it recorded about 63.3 million securities transactions, up from 53.6 million in 2024, according to its annual figures. At the end of 2025 it managed about 5.4 million custody accounts with 2.38 trillion euros in assets under custody. The group includes the Berlin brokerage platform lemon.markets, dwp Service GmbH in Halle (Saale) and dwp Software Kft. in Budapest.

dwpbank's main business is securities processing for its client banks: custody account data, order handling from order intake to custody, corporate actions and shareholder communication, and back and middle office work it calls BOSC services. The service overview also lists direct trading with more than 15 trading partners and the handling of settlement penalties under the EU Central Securities Depositories Regulation (CSDR).

Most client banks run on WP2 today. Its successor, WP3, is in dwpbank's words modular and cloud native, built from about 400 microservices that can be extended one by one. dwpbank names the move of the EU to T+1 settlement in October 2027 as one of the changes the platform has to absorb. In September 2026, DAB BNP Paribas chose dwpbank for order routing, settlement and custody in its business with financial intermediaries.

Bonds without a paper certificate reach dwpbank's client banks through D7, the digital post-trade platform of Deutsche Börse Group. Through dwpbank's link to D7, NORD/LB issued a five-year bond fully digitally under the German Electronic Securities Act, explained on the page on the eWpG. dwpbank processes about 650,000 issues a year for its client banks and plans to move all of them to D7 over time.

Schuldschein loans, the German private placement loans that banks arrange for companies, take a second route. dwpbank developed finledger, a blockchain platform for these loans, together with DekaBank, DZ BANK and Helaba, as IT Finanzmagazin reported (in German), and its issuance services connect to it today.

wpNex is dwpbank's platform for digital assets. The name comes from nexus, a connection, and the platform links the classic securities business to crypto trading. A bank connects through the interface it already uses for securities, and its customers see bitcoin and ether next to their funds and shares in the online banking they know. They need no wallet and no private keys of their own, and they pay from their current account without moving money to a separate account first, as the wpNex page describes.

dwpbank launched wpNex in March 2023. MLP Banking AG, the first client, bought bitcoin in the pilot and later offered it to its customers. Ether followed in December 2024, with further ERC-20 tokens planned next. tradias, now part of Boerse Stuttgart Digital, executes the trades. Tangany keeps the cryptographic keys, Kaiko supplies the market data, and Crypto Risk Metrics supplies ESG data for each asset.

BaFin granted dwpbank a permission under MiCAR to execute orders for crypto assets on behalf of clients. dwpbank acts as commission agent for the banks and savings banks that use wpNex. A second permission, announced on September 28, 2026, covers the custody and administration of crypto assets and transfer services, so wpNex adds its own custody to trading. dwpbank also takes over reporting for its client banks, including the data that crypto transfers carry under the travel rule and the tax reporting under DAC8.

With the custody permission, dwpbank says it is building a crypto offer for their customers together with connected Sparkassen, as one part of a fully integrated crypto solution in the Sparkassen-Finanzgruppe. Finance Loop's page on Sparkasse crypto describes the savings banks' decision and the role of DekaBank. The page on Volksbank crypto describes meinKrypto, the offer of the cooperative banks.

dwpbank erhält MiCAR-Erlaubnis für Kryptoverwahrung und Transferdienstleistungen (in German): BaFin permits dwpbank to hold crypto assets for clients, and wpNex gains its own custody.

Neues Ökosystem für Wertpapierservices deckt gesamte Breite an Marktanforderungen ab (in German): dwpbank completes the purchase of lemon.markets, and both companies keep operating on their own.

Neue modulare Depotwelt der dwpbank adressiert Anlegerbedürfnisse passgenau (in German): a modular set of custody account models for client banks, built on WP3.

dwpbank startet mit "wpNex" Plattform für digitale Vermögenswerte (in German): the launch of wpNex with the first bitcoin trade of MLP.

dwpbank processes securities for other banks: their orders, settlement, custody accounts and corporate actions. Around 1,000 banks and savings banks in Germany outsource this work to it. Through wpNex it does the same for crypto trading and custody.

Yes. dwpbank is a bank supervised by BaFin, and it holds MiCAR permissions for executing crypto orders on behalf of clients, for the custody and administration of crypto assets, and for crypto transfer services.

dwpbank names 309 Sparkassen, four Landesbanken, DZ BANK with 692 cooperative banks, and 17 private and commercial banks as clients. DAB BNP Paribas and MLP Banking AG are among the institutions named in its press releases.

dwpbank does. The Berlin brokerage-as-a-service platform has been a dwpbank subsidiary since the purchase closed on September 30, 2025. Both companies keep operating on the market under their own names.