The European banking giant BPCE, one of the main financial entities in France, will begin to offer trading services for bitcoin (BTC) and other cryptocurrencies to its retail clients.
This movement, according to information provided by The Big Whale, would be realized starting tomorrow, Monday, December 8, allowing users to buy and sell BTC, ether (ETH), solana (SOL) and the USDC stablecoin directly through the applications of their regional entities.
In the initial pilot phase, The service will be available to approximately 2 million customers of four of the group’s 29 entities, including Banque Populaire Île-de-France and Caisse d’Épargne Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur.
The entity is implementing this service through an account dedicated to digital assets, which will have a monthly fee of 2.99 euros and a 1.5 percent commission for each transaction, with a minimum cost of 1 euro.
This process will be managed by Hexarq, BPCE’s digital assets subsidiary and also focused on tokenized real-world assets (RWA).
BPCE’s plan is to gradually implement the service in other branches throughout 2026, with the goal of monitoring its performance during launch and expanding access to 12 million customers.
This development is framed in a context of growing banking interest in Europe in the digital asset ecosystem, as reported by CriptoNoticias, evidenced by other initiatives such as that of Qivalis, which brings together ten large European banks to develop a stablecoin linked to the euro, and the efforts of DekaBank and Boerse Stuttgart Digital to accelerate the integration of bitcoin in German retail banking.