Swiss Crypto Bank SEBA Expands to 9 New Markets
- Investors from Hong Kong, U.K., Italy, Germany, France, Austria, Portugal, and the Netherlands can now create accounts for the crypto bank.
- The market expansion comes only a month after the crypto bank received its banking license from Swiss regulators.
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SEBA Bank AG, the Switzerland-based cryptocurrency bank, has expanded its services to nine new countries only a month after going fully operational, the company announced in a press release on 12 December.
According to the report, institutional clients and accredited investors from Singapore, Hong Kong, the U.K., Italy, Germany, France, Austria, Portugal, and the Netherlands can now open accounts with the crypto bank.
The bank can now help investors from those countries with both crypto-crypto and crypto-fiat conversion services, as well as offer enterprise accounts to blockchain firms and their employees.
The company commented:
“More than 10 years after the invention of Bitcoin, there is still a tremendous gap between traditional banking on one side and decentralised finance on the other side. SEBA Bank, an integrated bank focused on digital assets, works as a bridge builder offering a comprehensive range of services in digital as well as in traditional finance.”
Going fully live in November, SEBA is a fully-regulated institution, which has received a banking license from the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA) in August 2019.
The bank’s customers can use its SEBAwallet app, e-banking services and SEBA card facilities to manage the five cryptocurrencies which it supports, them being Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Stellar (XLM), Litecoin (LTC) and Ethereum Classic (ETC).
SEBA is the second cryptocurrency bank in Switzerland which has received a banking license from FINMA. Digital asset technology group Sygnum received regulatory approval on the same day as SEBA, and likewise is looking at a global expansion.
The company has been in talks with regulators in Singapore in order to secure a banking license on the island nation.
Earlier this year, FINMA released new guidance on regulatory requirements for payments on the blockchain. Switzerland’s regulator stated that it tried to follow the framework for digital asset regulation issued by the intergovernmental Financial Action Task Force (FATF) in June.
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- Silvergate noted that a “transformational shift” in the crypto space left it with a $1.05 billion net loss for Q4 2022, and a $4,7 billion reduction in deposits compared to Q3.
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