European cryptocurrency exchange Bitpanda is collaborating with Italian open finance provider Fabrick to offer digital asset trading services to Italian banks and fintechs.
The firms announced the agreement on Tuesday at the Milan Fintech Summit 2021. According to a press statement obtained by CoinDesk, the partnership will give local customers of traditional Italian banks as well as fintechs access to more than 170 digital assets through Bitpanda’s White Label product.
Founded in Austria in 2014, Bitpanda claims to be one of the fastest growing fintechs in Europe. In March, it became Austria’s first unicorn startup after closing a series B funding round at $170 million. In August, it raised another $263 million, bringing the company’s valuation up to $4.1 billion with over 3 million users outside the U.S. Bitpanda moved into Italy less than six months ago, and has an office set up in Milan.
Fabrick is a part of Sella, Italy’s largest group of banks, and has 510 application programming interfaces (API) available on its platform that allow banking applications to communicate with each other. The APIs connect over 500 Italian banks.
Fabrick will connect its services to Bitpanda’s backend through a set of APIs, according to the statement.
“All of Bitpanda’s White Label partners, including customers of Fabrick users, can still interact with the front end that they are familiar with, this encompasses the entire user experience, from researching an asset via Bitpanda’s tools, to investing in it, as well as portfolio monitoring and future asset trading,” the statement said.
This isn’t the first crypto integration that Fabrick has enabled.
Fabrick currently has a 50% controlling stake in HYPE, a Sella project that enabled about 1.2 million Italian customers to buy, sell and store bitcoin through its app last year through the tech provided by the U.S.-based crypto custody platform Conio.
“The goal is to simplify and accelerate innovation in that space,” said Paolo Zaccardi, CEO of Fabrick. “The interesting part of the platform model is that when we will have a digital euro, we will add similar APIs to manage it. That’s a way to accelerate the adoption of digital assets, and we are seeing very terrific demand for customers, particularly from the young generation in this space.”
The European Central Bank is currently conducting a two-year experiment into a digital euro.
Bitpanda co-founder and CEO Eric Demuth told CoinDesk that the partnership with Fabrick will enable Italian banks and fintechs to incorporate all of Bitpanda’s solutions to their platforms, including digital asset custody and fractional trading.
Bitpanda currently lets people invest in cryptocurrencies, commission-free fractional stocks, exchange traded funds (ETF), and precious metals through its platform, according to Orlando Merone, country manager for Bitpanda Italy.
According to the press statement, Bitpanda expects to reach 100,000 customers in Italy within the year.
