Raiffeisen Bank International announced on September 23, 2026, a group-wide framework with Vienna-based Bitpanda Enterprise to supply crypto trading, custody, and tokenization infrastructure across 11 Central and Eastern European markets. The deal potentially reaches 18.8 million banking customer...
"We are seeing growing demand for crypto assets in our markets, which we are addressing with a strong, reputable partner." — Michael Höllerer, CEO, Raiffeisen Bank International
Raiffeisen Bank International announced on September 23, 2026, a group-wide framework with Vienna-based Bitpanda Enterprise to supply crypto trading, custody, and tokenization infrastructure across 11 Central and Eastern European markets. The deal potentially reaches 18.8 million banking customers and marks one of the broadest single-agreement crypto rollouts by a traditional European bank.
The partnership is significant less for Raiffeisen — which is the latest in a growing queue of European lenders adding crypto — and more for what it reveals about Bitpanda's position as the dominant white-label crypto infrastructure provider for European banking. Bitpanda Enterprise now counts Société Générale, Deutsche Börse Group, LBBW (via BW-Bank), N26, RAKBANK, and RBI among its institutional clients, spanning the EU, UK, UAE, and Latin America. The company's B2B partner base doubled from 9 to 16 active financial institutions in 2025.
This report examines the economics, competitive positioning, and execution risks of Bitpanda's bank-infrastructure strategy, and what the RBI deal implies for the emerging architecture of European crypto distribution.
Raiffeisen Bank International operates across 11 Central and Eastern European markets with total assets of approximately €218 billion as of Q1 2026. The bank reported 18.8 million customers at end-June 2026.
Under the September 23 agreement, Bitpanda Enterprise will supply the full crypto technology stack — trading execution, custody, liquidity provisioning, payments infrastructure, stablecoin access, and tokenization services — as an embedded layer within RBI subsidiary banking apps. Each of RBI's network banks will decide independently what to offer, when, and to which customer segments, based on local regulatory requirements and market conditions.
First launch markets: Albania, Czech Republic, and Slovakia, targeted for H1 2027. Austria already has a live deployment. Raiffeisenlandesbank Niederösterreich-Wien (RLB NÖ-Wien) became the first traditional EU bank to integrate crypto trading inside an existing banking app in early 2024, using Bitpanda's technology through its "Mein ELBA" platform. Raiffeisen Salzburg followed in August 2026, and Tyrol launched in May 2026.
Initial asset coverage: Bitcoin and Ethereum at launch, with additional cryptocurrencies and savings plans in subsequent phases.
The deal is structured as a framework agreement, not a guaranteed deployment. Bitpanda co-founder Christian Trummer noted that the partnership "combines the reach and trust of traditional banking with digital asset technology to create infrastructure that works across markets and borders." The rollout, according to Bitpanda, "remains at an early stage."
Bitpanda Enterprise, formally launched in March 2026 as a rebranding and expansion of Bitpanda Technology Solutions, is the company's institutional arm. It packages crypto infrastructure into an API-driven, white-label platform that banks and fintechs embed inside their own customer-facing applications. Bitpanda maintains no direct relationship with end customers; the bank retains all customer data, branding, and product decisions.
Current institutional client roster includes:
| Partner | Type | Market | Status | |---|---|---|---| | Raiffeisen Bank International | Universal bank | 11 CEE markets | Framework signed Sept 2026; Austria live since 2024 | | N26 | Digital bank | Germany, Austria, Portugal, Belgium, Ireland, Switzerland | Live since 2022 | | LBBW / BW-Bank | State bank (Landesbank) | Germany | Retail crypto via securities account live since Sept 9, 2026 | | Société Générale | Universal bank | France, EU | Partner | | Deutsche Börse Group | Exchange operator | Germany, EU | Partner | | RAKBANK | Commercial bank | UAE | Partner | | Onda Finance | Fintech | LATAM | Partner |
The active B2B partner count grew from 9 to 16 financial institutions during 2025. Including the RBI framework, Bitpanda Enterprise's addressable customer base through bank partners now exceeds 25 million retail banking users across Europe, the Middle East, and Latin America.
Service scope: Trading infrastructure (650+ assets), custody, liquidity aggregation, staking (50+ assets), margin trading (100+ assets), payments, stablecoin access, tokenization, and web3 wallet functionality.
The business model is infrastructure-as-a-service: Bitpanda earns fees on transaction volume and custody, while the bank sets consumer pricing and captures the customer relationship. This mirrors the embedded finance model used by Stripe in payments or Plaid in banking data — the infrastructure provider operates invisibly behind the bank's brand.
Bitpanda's consolidated financials for FY 2025:
| Metric | FY 2025 | FY 2024 | Change | |---|---|---|---| | Adjusted Revenue | €371M ($430M) | €321M | +16% | | Adjusted EBITDA | €13M | €52M | -75% | | EBITDA Margin | ~3.5% | ~30%+ | Significant compression | | Registered Users (B2C) | 7.4M | 5.9M | +25% | | B2B Partners | 16 | 9 | +78% |
The 75% EBITDA decline is notable. The company attributed it to deliberate pre-IPO spending on product development, regulatory licensing across jurisdictions, and international expansion. Whether this is a strategic investment phase or a structural margin problem is an open question. The company does not break out Bitpanda Enterprise revenue separately from its consumer brokerage business.
IPO status: Bitpanda initially targeted a Frankfurt Stock Exchange listing in H1 2026 with a €4-5 billion valuation. Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and Deutsche Bank were retained as underwriters. The listing has been postponed, with outgoing CEO Lukas Enzersdorfer-Konrad stating: "We are ready but we need to consider what the right market timing is and what's best for the company."
Enzersdorfer-Konrad will step down as CEO in Q1 2027 to join Austrian lender Erste Group in an asset-management and digital-investing role. Co-founder Christian Trummer has assumed the co-CEO role immediately. The board has opened a succession process.
Austria's Financial Market Authority (FMA) fined Bitpanda GmbH €70,000 for MiCAR disclosure and marketing breaches involving late crypto-asset white paper publication — a minor penalty, but an indication of regulatory friction even for licensed operators.
Bitpanda Enterprise does not operate in a vacuum. Several infrastructure providers compete for the bank-facing crypto layer:
Fireblocks — The most direct competitor in institutional infrastructure. Fireblocks reports 2,400+ clients and 80+ banks in production globally, with MPC-based custody. Fireblocks focuses on custody and transaction orchestration rather than full white-label brokerage. Its model requires banks to build more of the customer-facing layer themselves. The Qivalis consortium — twelve banks including BNP Paribas, ING, UniCredit, and BBVA — plans to launch a euro-backed stablecoin in H2 2026 using Fireblocks infrastructure.
BitGo — Recently listed on the NYSE, BitGo serves institutional custody and infrastructure with a compliance-first approach. It offers regulated, insured multi-signature custody but focuses on institutional rather than retail-embedded offerings.
Taurus — A Swiss-based digital asset infrastructure provider serving banks including Credit Suisse (now UBS), Deutsche Bank, and Arab Bank Switzerland. Taurus offers tokenization, custody, and node infrastructure.
Deutsche Bank's in-house approach — Deutsche Bank plans to launch its own Bitcoin, Ether, and stablecoin custody for institutional clients by year-end 2026. If deployed, its €1.7 trillion balance sheet would make it the largest European bank offering direct crypto custody without a third-party infrastructure provider.
Bitpanda's advantage relative to Fireblocks and BitGo is the full-stack white-label offering: it handles everything from trading UI components to custody to regulatory compliance, reducing integration time for banks. The disadvantage is that it creates dependency on a single vendor for the entire crypto value chain.
The Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA) transitional period expired on July 1, 2026. According to available data, more than 83% of the EU's 1,200-plus pre-MiCA crypto operators were forced out of the market — unable or unwilling to meet full MiCA licensing requirements.
Banks, which already possess KYC/AML systems, custody controls, capital reserves, and regulatory relationships, gained a structural advantage. EU banks on the MiCA crypto provider register doubled from approximately 40 to 80 between June and September 2026. Banks now represent 23% of all registered crypto asset service providers, up from 17% three months prior.
For Bitpanda, this regulatory clearing is the catalyst. Banks that previously hesitated to enter crypto now face a competitive dynamic: their peers are launching, and the regulatory framework gives them a single rulebook across all 27 EU member states. Bitpanda's pitch — plug in our API, go live in months instead of years — addresses the speed-to-market problem that banks face when attempting to build crypto capabilities internally.
Eight of Europe's top twenty banks now offer live crypto services (custody, trading, or stablecoin issuance), up from two in early 2025. Société Générale's SG-FORGE subsidiary has MiCA authorization and operates its EURCV stablecoin with a $452 million market cap. BBVA offers direct Bitcoin and Ether trading through its mobile app in Spain. Santander offers both individual and institutional crypto services.
Revenue concentration: Bitpanda does not disclose Enterprise-specific revenue. If the B2B segment is still sub-scale relative to the consumer brokerage, a CEO departure and IPO delay could indicate that the institutional strategy is not yet self-sustaining.
Framework vs. deployment: The RBI deal is a framework agreement. Of 11 CEE markets, only Austria is live. Albania, Czech Republic, and Slovakia are targeted for H1 2027 — meaning the 18.8 million customer figure is theoretical addressable market, not actual users. Bitpanda itself described the rollout as being "at an early stage."
Regulatory fragmentation outside the EU: Not all RBI markets fall within MiCA's regulatory harmonization. Markets outside the EU will require separate regulatory approvals, adding complexity and cost.
CEO transition during critical period: The departure of CEO Enzersdorfer-Konrad to competitor Erste Group, combined with a postponed IPO, introduces execution uncertainty during Bitpanda's most important growth phase.
Vendor lock-in concerns: Banks embedding Bitpanda's full stack become dependent on a single provider for trading, custody, and compliance. If Bitpanda faces financial or operational difficulties, switching costs for partner banks would be substantial.
Margin sustainability: A 75% EBITDA decline while revenue grew 16% suggests that current unit economics may not support the infrastructure build without either a return to higher B2C trading volumes or a significant scale-up in B2B fees.
Bitpanda is positioning itself as the default infrastructure layer for European banks entering crypto — the embedded-finance model applied to digital assets. The RBI framework agreement, following live deployments with N26, LBBW, and the Austrian Raiffeisen banks, demonstrates that the company's white-label model is gaining traction with traditional lenders accelerating into the post-MiCA market.
The numbers tell a mixed story. The client roster is expanding, partner counts are growing, and addressable reach through bank channels now exceeds 25 million users. But revenue growth has not yet translated into margin expansion — EBITDA fell 75% in 2025, the IPO has stalled, and the CEO is leaving for a competitor.
Whether Bitpanda can convert framework agreements into live deployments, convert deployments into transaction volume, and convert volume into sustainable margins will determine if the infrastructure play works. The underlying demand from European banks is real — MiCA's regulatory clearing eliminated most standalone competitors and pushed banks to fill the gap. The question is execution, not market opportunity.