Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria (BBVA), a prominent Spanish banking group, has launched Bitcoin ($BTC) and Ethereum ($ETH) trading and custody services to retail clients in Spain. This would be accessible in the already existing mobile application of the bank and would allow the customers to purchase, sell, and store their crypto assets in the app. BBVA is offering crypto services to retail clients in its home market for the first time.
This deployment is after a plea was made to the National Securities Market Commission (CNMV) in Spain in March 2025. The new crypto platform fully addresses Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) regulation of the European Union, a legally uniform environment to provide crypto asset services in EU countries. The customers are required to be of legal age to avail of the service, and investment advice is not offered as a part of this service.
BBVA Integrates Crypto Custody into Core Banking
The crypto feature at BBVA is standardized into the bank’s digital banking environment by offering a full-scale integration as against many other financial firms that have redirected to third-party crypto platforms. This system helps the user to transact freely, and a system controlled totally by the bank. BBVA has ownership of all aspects of the custody of funds, with assets of customers held in internal systems of the bank.
The bank indicates that the direct integration offers an extra level of operational management and compliance. All transactions are undertaken in the controlled environment of BBVA, and this negates the use of a third-party custodian. This framework corresponds to the transparency and accountability in digital finance advocated by the EU.
International growth of Digital Asset Services in Europe
The Spanish rollout is in line with the previous BBVA experiments on crypto in other markets. In 2021, the bank launched the same services to its private banking clients in Switzerland and to retail customers in Turkey in 2023 via Garanti BBVA. The entrance to Spain will become the third jurisdiction where the bank provides digital asset solutions and the first to address the wider retail segment in a home market.
