Crypto trading in the Sparkassen app: Deka is the counterparty

Since Monday 19 October 2026, customers of the first German savings banks have been able to buy and sell Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, XRP and Polygon in the Sparkassen app. The product is called “Krypto – powered by Deka”. According to DekaBank’s price information it costs €0.99 per order plus a spread, and Deka’s list dated 6 November shows it live at seven institutions: Frankfurter Sparkasse, Taunus Sparkasse, Sparkasse Karlsruhe, Sparkasse Rottal-Inn, Niederrheinische Sparkasse RheinLippe, Stadtsparkasse München and Landessparkasse zu Oldenburg. The German Savings Banks Association (DSGV) says that 30 to 40 more institutions are to follow each month.

Coverage of the launch read it as the savings banks entering the crypto market. In legal terms, the entrant is DekaBank, the group’s central asset manager and securities house. Under Deka’s special terms, the customer signs the contract with Deka, which buys and sells the crypto-assets to the customer using its own capital, holds them in custody and is listed in the register of the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA). On the author’s count, not a single savings bank appears there. The cooperative banks have taken the same legal route, but with the opposite allocation of roles: 71 of them have notified the execution of orders themselves and, as at VR-Bank Würzburg, act for their customers as agents. For retail banking boards, this design determines who sets the price, who carries the obligations under the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA) and who holds the contract when a customer leaves.

This article is based on contract terms, price lists and the ESMA register. It takes no view on whether crypto-assets belong in a savings bank account. The count of cooperative banks is based on the names in the register as accessed on 6 November 2026. How an individual savings bank participates in the offer is governed by a provider agreement with Deka that has not been published, so nothing can be said here about remuneration or risk sharing between the two.

Deka signs the contract, sets the price and holds the assets

Clause 1.1 of the special terms for crypto-assets states that “the customer and DekaBank” conclude a crypto-asset services contract. The savings bank appears in the contract as a “Kooperations-Sparkasse”, a cooperating savings bank with a provider agreement that gives the customer access. The customer logs in to the Sparkassen app via single sign-on and places the order in what the consumer information calls a “DekaBank WebView environment”, a Deka screen embedded in the app. Settlement runs through the customer’s current account at the savings bank, and Deka has delegated payment processing to S Broker AG & Co. KG. On screen, it remains a savings bank product. Contractually, it is Deka’s.

Deka’s August 2026 execution policy is more explicit still. For retail clients, it says, trading takes place “as a rule within the crypto-asset service ‘exchange of crypto-assets for funds’ pursuant to Article 3(1)(19) and Article 77 MiCAR”, and it continues: “In doing so, DekaBank concludes purchase or sale contracts for crypto-assets directly with the customer, using its own capital, and thereby itself becomes the customer’s contractual counterparty.” In the consumer information, the price is derived from live market data plus “DekaBank’s own spread”. Anyone who has sat on a trading floor knows this distinction from securities dealing. Acting as agent, the bank buys in the market for the client’s account and earns a fee. Dealing as principal, it is the counterparty and earns the gap between bid and offer.

Custody stays with Deka itself, in one pooled wallet per blockchain, and the customer receives no private key. The customer information says that holdings are protected “by operation of law” under the German Crypto Markets Supervision Act (KMAG) in the event of Deka’s insolvency and are kept separate from its own assets. There is no statutory deposit protection. According to a Deka list from October 2026, crypto-assets can only be transferred out to four providers, namely Crypto Finance (Deutschland), Tangany, Boerse Stuttgart Digital Custody and Bullish Europe, and not to a customer’s own wallet. For customers who never wanted to manage a key, that is a convenience. Anyone who wants to take the holding elsewhere, however, needs an account with one of those four providers, and the special terms link the contract with Deka to a settlement account at a cooperating savings bank.

The design is deliberate. When Deka extended its partnership with Boerse Stuttgart Digital to retail clients in October 2025, Marion Spielmann, DekaBank’s Chief Operating Officer for banking business and depositary, explained: “With our in-house infrastructure we secure the largest possible part of the value chain within the Sparkassen-Finanzgruppe and make integrating the offer as simple as possible for the savings banks.” The value thus stays in the group, but with Deka, and the savings bank receives a product it does not have to run.

71 cooperative banks are in the register and execute orders themselves

The cooperative banking group built its platform, meinKrypto, with DZ BANK and the IT provider Atruvia, and launched ahead of the savings banks. DZ BANK appears in the ESMA register with a date of 23 December 2025. According to IT Finanzmagazin, however, each Volksbank and Raiffeisenbank must also file a notification “in its own right” with the supervisor for meinKrypto, and the register shows exactly that: 71 entries from Volksbanks, Raiffeisenbanks, VR banks, Sparda banks and PSD banks, all under Article 60 and all for the execution of orders on behalf of clients. Five of them carry register dates between 12 and 25 November, so they are announced but not yet in effect. Counting by name also captures Sparda and PSD banks, whose platform was not checked for this article.

VR-Bank Würzburg, which the Börsen-Zeitung reported in May 2026 as one of the first cooperative banks to offer the service, shows in its price list what this means for the customer. Crypto trading appears there as a “Kommissionsgeschäft”, agency trading in German law, at a commission of 1.5%, with a minimum order of €10 for purchases and a proviso that the bank passes on “expenses and third-party costs” charged to it. According to the DZ BANK press release, orders are executed via EUWAX AG. VR-Bank Würzburg states that custody rests with Boerse Stuttgart Digital Custody, in pooled wallets in which “crypto-assets of several customers, including those of other partners” are held together. The local bank is therefore a crypto-asset service provider in its own right. It sets its price in its own list and carries the obligations under the regulation, while execution and custody are handled by EUWAX and Boerse Stuttgart Digital Custody.

Both models have their own logic. The savings bank model spares each of the 337 institutions its own notification and price list, and it keeps custody within the group. The cooperative model keeps the customer with the local bank, which is responsible for the fee, the cost disclosure and complaints, and buys in the infrastructure from outside. A cost comparison for the customer cannot be made from the published documents, though. An order of €1,000 incurs €15 in commission in Würzburg, and €0.99 at Deka plus a spread that no published Deka document quantifies. Which option is cheaper turns on figures missing on both sides: Deka’s spread and the third-party costs the local bank passes on.

Notification under Article 60 gives credit institutions the shorter route

MiCA offers two doors into crypto-asset services. Under Article 59, a provider either needs authorisation under Article 63 or belongs to the financial entities that only have to notify under Article 60. Credit institutions notify their supervisor of the intended service 40 working days before they start. On the author’s count, the German part of the ESMA register holds 117 entries by notification and 8 authorisations under Article 63, among them Boerse Stuttgart Digital Custody, Tangany, Crypto Finance (Deutschland), Bullish Europe and Bitpanda Asset Management. The gap mainly reflects how one banking group has registered, however, since around 71 of the 117 entries come from cooperative banks. Trade Republic, N26 and Commerzbank also use the notification route, as does Deutsche Bank, listed with a date of 12 October 2026 for custody and transfer.

Shortly before the savings banks’ launch, one case seemed to show a closed door, as if Germany’s Federal Financial Supervisory Authority (BaFin) were refusing authorisation to other providers. Only this one case is documented. According to an ad hoc announcement that Bitcoin Group SE published on 6 October 2026, BaFin has refused the authorisation application that its subsidiary futurum bank AG filed on 27 June 2025. The announcement gives no reasons. Trading on the Bitcoin.de platform had already largely stopped on 12 June. Despite its name, futurum bank is, according to its legal notice, “authorised to provide financial services” and is not described there as a credit institution. BaFin’s own database was not checked for this article. The notification route for credit institutions under Article 60(1) was therefore not open to it. As far as can be seen, the line runs between licence classes, not between established and new providers.

The logic behind it is plausible: credit institutions are already subject to capital, governance and outsourcing rules, and a second full review of the same legal entity would repeat much of that. For some of the authorised firms, the banks’ entry is also business. Four of the eight are on Deka’s list of permitted transfer destinations, and one of them, Boerse Stuttgart Digital Custody, holds the crypto-assets of the cooperative banks’ customers.

The wording of Article 77 leaves the spread unquantified

For the exchange of crypto-assets for funds, Article 77(2) MiCA requires providers to publish “a firm price of the crypto-assets or a method for determining the price of the crypto-assets”, together with any applicable limit on the amount to be exchanged. Deka publishes a method, live market data plus its own spread, and a limit of €250,000 per transaction. The wording does not require the spread to be quantified. Whether a method without its most important parameter serves the purpose of the provision is a question the text leaves open, and no supervisory guidance on the point is known. Article 77(4) is also open: it requires providers to publish information on concluded transactions, “including transaction volumes and prices”. The Deka documents reviewed for this article contain nothing of the kind, although such information may be published elsewhere on the website.

Deka does not check whether a trade suits the customer. The special terms say so plainly: “DekaBank does not assess whether a transaction is appropriate or suitable for the customer.” That matches the regulation, which in Article 81 requires a suitability assessment only for advice and portfolio management. The legislator has, however, flagged the gap itself. Under Article 140(2)(p), the Commission’s report, due by 30 June 2027, is to assess whether appropriateness tests should be added to Articles 78, 79 and 80, which cover the execution, placing, and reception and transmission of orders. The exchange under Article 77 is not mentioned. On the wording, such a test would therefore reach the cooperative banks’ agency model sooner than Deka’s principal model. The assessment feeds into the same report described in the article on the MiCA review.

The strongest counter-argument comes from consumer protection. Sandra Klug of the Hamburg consumer advice centre warned as early as March 2026, speaking to the dpa news agency, that crypto-assets might look less risky than they are once they are available at every savings bank. At the launch, the DSGV stated that “advice or active promotion by the savings banks across the board” is not planned, and Stefan Marotzke, the association’s spokesperson, described the target group to BTC-ECHO as “a small group of adult self-directed investors who deliberately choose cryptocurrencies”. Both are true, but the brand reaches further than the advertising. In a four-country survey by Boerse Stuttgart Digital and Marketagent, reported by IT Finanzmagazin, 38% of Germans named their own bank as the most trustworthy place to start investing in crypto, against 19% for a specialist provider. An offer that is not promoted still benefits from that trust, even though the counterparty’s name is in the product title.

The pace of the roll-out can be judged from 19 November at the earliest

Five savings banks went live on 19 October, and Deka’s list dated 6 November shows seven. The DSGV cites roughly 337 savings banks on its website and plans 30 to 40 institutions a month. At the launch, however, Joachim Schmalzl, executive board member of the DSGV, hedged: “Each savings bank decides for itself when it starts. Interest within the group is high, and further institutions will join week by week.” The first month of the plan ends on 19 November. Only then can the number be measured against the association’s own target, and even then only as a snapshot.

Interest is documented, take-up is not yet. According to Platow Brief on the day of the launch, more than 200 of the 337 savings banks are considering the offer. For Bavaria, Eva Mang of the Bavarian Savings Banks Association said in early November that activations would extend “into 2027”. The road to the offer has been long. In June 2022, according to Finance Forward, the DSGV’s committees recommended against offering crypto trading. On 30 June 2025 the board resolved the opposite. According to the ESMA register, Deka began the exchange of crypto-assets for funds, the service behind the retail product, on 25 June 2026, just under four months before the launch. At the launch, Joachim Schmalzl said the group had weighed “very carefully whether and how a crypto offering fits us”.

The savings bank group has built a regulated product once, at Deka, rather than in 337 institutions, while the local bank keeps the account, the app and the customer relationship. The cooperative banks left responsibility where the customer holds the account and bought in the technology. Which model works will show in costs, complaints and customers’ willingness to switch, not in the number of activations. For the customer, the savings bank remains what the special terms describe: access, log-in and the account the money leaves from.

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Christian Schablitzki – the agentic banker

Strategy & Management Consultant · Agentic AI expert for financial institutions

More than 20 years in investment banking and derivatives trading, followed by over 10 years advising financial institutions. Certified as Claude Partner – Claude Code (Anthropic), as well as in Google AI, Generative AI Leader (Google Cloud) and IBM RAG and Agentic AI.

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