The Missing Piece: What Banks Need to Offer Digital Assets to Their Clients

TL;DR

• Strategy, not compliance, is the first blocker: many banks have not decided which service to launch first or which clients to serve.
• Italian banks are a few years behind Germany, which regulated crypto before MiCA, but are now moving from POCs to partner selection and real projects.
• Expect more than a year to set the strategy, select a vendor and sign, then three to eight months to go live with a full-stack partner.
• Compliance is an obligation of means: existing AML processes can be adapted, and the right partners turn it into a competitive advantage.
• Start with trading and custody, add staking after one or two years, and keep pricing transparent.
• Demand is underestimated: in Boerse Stuttgart Digital's Crypto Compass survey, about 35% of bank customers would switch banks for an integrated traditional and digital offer.

Speakers

The Missing Piece: What Banks Need to Offer Digital Assets to Their Clients

• Luciano Serra, Country Manager Italy at Boerse Stuttgart Digital
• Guillaume Rodenas, Account Director at TRM Labs

The panel was moderated by Raphaël Bloch, CEO of The Big Whale.

The first blocker is strategy, not regulation

Luciano Serra cited the perception of risk, timing and budget, but above all the lack of strategy: many banks had not decided which service to launch first, or whether to start with retail, private or corporate clients. Boerse Stuttgart Digital, which also runs a retail business in its group, supports banks with customer segmentation and marketing insight, then provides the infrastructure. Two models coexist:

• Banks that extend their own banking licence to hold client assets
• Banks that start under Boerse Stuttgart Digital's licence and apply for an extension later

Asked about blockers, one participant named cost: the entry ticket is too high for traditional banks. Luciano Serra called it a perception: building everything in-house is expensive, but a full-stack partner gets a bank to market in four to six months at most.

Italy is late, but moving from POCs to real projects

Compared with Germany, where Boerse Stuttgart Digital serves the two largest banking groups, Italy is “some years late”. Germany regulated the market years before MiCA, and Boerse Stuttgart Digital has been licensed there since 2019. Two years after MiCA came into force, Luciano Serra now sees many Italian banks defining strategies and starting partner selection and real projects, not just POCs. Guillaume Rodenas sees no cultural divide across Europe: TRM Labs works with leading banks in France, Spain and the UK, and the difference comes down to who wants to move first.

Compliance is an obligation of means

Guillaume Rodenas called compliance “the elephant in the room”, especially since MiCA, but argued that with the right tools and partners it becomes a competitive advantage rather than a limit:

• Much of the fear is perception: in some countries banks cannot even advertise a crypto offer, and they expect a long change-management plan
• Existing AML procedures for fiat can be adapted to crypto; the real work is internal buy-in and leadership alignment
• Institutions have an obligation of means: show the regulator that the right processes are in place, Travel Rule included. Exposure to a sanctioned entity will happen; the point is to minimise and document it
• Accountability towards the client stays with the licensed bank: the provider flags issues and supplies screening and monitoring data, the bank decides

Integration takes more than a year, and lock-in can be managed

The Big Whale's latest monthly benchmark found integration into the banking stack to be the main bottleneck. Luciano Serra split the timeline in two:

• Internal phase (strategy, vendor selection, contract): often more than a year, depending on top-management push and collaboration across the bank
• Operational phase after signing: three to four months if the integration is simple, six to eight months otherwise

Against vendor lock-in, a concern for two people in the room, a bank can split flows 80/20 between two providers, the second serving for business continuity, but few do because it is costly. More common is a progressive path: start fully outsourced, then internalise activities year after year, moving from make-or-buy to a modular model. Guillaume Rodenas sees large institutions building similar “waterfall” set-ups in compliance, where TRM Labs wins clients through its coverage of less common blockchains, assets and privacy coins.

Start with trading and custody, and price transparently

There is no single star product, said Luciano Serra, but revenue comes from trading and staking rather than custody alone. The usual path:

• Start with trading and custody, and do the basics well
• Widen the range of coins and order types over time
• Add staking after one or two years

Transparency matters more than price level: crypto-native platforms stack transaction fees, spreads and other charges, whereas a client expecting 30% over two years will not mind a 1.2% to 1.5% trading fee if it is clear. Banca Sella, which holds a licence extension for custody, illustrates a more cautious route: custody first, letting clients trade elsewhere and bring their coins back to the bank.

Demand is higher than banks think

For Guillaume Rodenas, crypto may not win banks new clients, but it retains existing ones, who want speed, access and 24/7 trading. Luciano Serra described it as a defensive move to stop outflows to Revolut, Coinbase and crypto-native platforms:

• The first wave of young, crypto-native users is over; the second is made of typical bank customers who avoided unregulated providers without branches or contact centres
• Boerse Stuttgart Digital's Crypto Compass survey of Italy, Germany, Spain and France found about 35% of customers willing to switch banks for an integrated offer (35% in Italy, 38% in Germany, 32% elsewhere)
• Private banking is underrated: around 90% of the financial advisors he knows have large clients asking for crypto and no product to offer, and risk losing the next generation of heirs
• Corporate demand is lower for now, although some banks plan to start there

DeFi will come, but later

In the Q&A, a participant noted that the eight CASPs authorised in Italy are all licensed for custody. Another, from a provider in the same business, said much of a bank's work is contractual: defining liability in service level agreements, for a trading outage as much as a blockchain hard fork, with reputational risk as the underlying obstacle. Guillaume Rodenas expects banks to offer DeFi lending eventually, though not from day one. Luciano Serra cited JPMorgan's ambitions in institutional DeFi and sees convergence already under way: same players, same customers, similar rules (MiFID II, the DLT Pilot Regime, MiCA) and similar cost structures. Taxation, a participant added, remains a brake no provider can remove.

Conclusion

Milan showed that the missing piece for banks is less technology than decision-making. The infrastructure exists, full-stack partners can take a bank live within months, and compliance can be handled as an obligation of means. What is missing is a clear choice of which service to launch and for whom, internal alignment to get through a year-long selection, and transparent pricing. Italian banks are starting late, but they are starting, and the Crypto Compass figures show the cost of waiting: when the first major banks offer an integrated product, a third of customers say they are ready to follow.