Fibank Adds Bitpanda Crypto Trading to My Fibank App
Fibank has signed a partnership with Bitpanda Enterprise, the institutional arm of Austrian crypto firm Bitpanda, to offer crypto trading inside its My Fibank mobile app. The deal puts Fibank crypto trading in front of the bank's more than one million customers and, the two companies say, makes Fibank the first bank in Bulgaria to embed digital-asset trading directly in its own app. Rollout to customers is expected in early 2027, with a €1 minimum and round-the-clock access once a user clears an approval step.
Bitpanda will be the sole provider of the crypto services. Fibank supplies the distribution: its app, its customer base, and its brand. Bitpanda supplies the trading, custody, and the regulatory permissions that sit underneath. Customers who opt in will be able to buy, hold, and track digital assets next to their current and savings accounts in a single interface, subject to acceptance under Bitpanda's own terms.
What is Fibank actually launching, and when?
The headline event is a commercial agreement, not a live product. The companies announced the tie-up on 12 October 2026, but the consumer service is slated for early 2027, so Fibank customers cannot trade today. When it does go live, the offer will run 24/7 through a Bitpanda interface built into My Fibank, with a €1 entry point aimed at first-time buyers rather than active traders.
Fibank is one of Bulgaria's larger lenders and describes itself as the biggest bank with majority Bulgarian ownership, with a regional footprint that includes a branch in Cyprus and a subsidiary in Albania. It has pushed into new markets over the past year, extending My Fibank services to Greek customers in mid-2025 and placing a €50m bond to meet regulatory capital requirements. The Bitpanda deal continues a pattern the bank has leaned on before: it was also among the first in Bulgaria to launch a PSD2 open-banking platform, back in 2019.
Why is Bitpanda signing up banks across Europe?
Because the bank channel is where the next wave of retail crypto users sits. Bitpanda launched Bitpanda Enterprise as a dedicated business-to-business unit in March 2026, packaging the trading, custody, liquidity, and settlement infrastructure it has run since 2014 and selling it to institutions that want to offer crypto without building the plumbing themselves. The company says the unit already powers more than 30 million end users through partner institutions and holds MiCA and VARA licences alongside an FCA registration.
Fibank joins a roster that now spans much of European banking. Bitpanda Enterprise counts N26, Société Générale, Deutsche Börse Group, selected Raiffeisen banks, the UAE's RAKBANK, and Deutsche Bank among its partners, and has pushed beyond the EU into the UK, the UAE, and Latin America. The model repeats with each new name: the bank keeps the customer relationship and the app, Bitpanda runs the regulated activity in the background. Fibank is the latest proof that the template travels, this time into a market where no domestic bank had offered it before.
The regulatory backdrop explains the timing. The EU's Markets in Crypto-Assets framework, known as MiCA, now provides a single authorisation regime for crypto services across the bloc. That lets a licensed provider such as Bitpanda extend trading into EU markets including Bulgaria without each partner bank securing its own crypto permissions, lowering the barrier for a mid-sized lender to add the service.
What does this mean for Bulgaria's crypto market?
It opens a market that has lagged its Western European neighbours. Integrated crypto access through a mainstream bank has been largely absent in Bulgaria and the wider region, which is what gives Fibank its first-mover claim. That window may be narrow. In September 2026, Raiffeisen Bank International agreed a group-wide arrangement with Bitpanda that could extend crypto access to up to 18 million customers across its Central and Eastern European network, leaving each local bank to set its own launch date. RBI operates a subsidiary in Bulgaria, so the same infrastructure provider now underpins more than one potential route into the market.
For the customers themselves, the terms carry a clear warning. Fibank and Bitpanda both stress that these are digital products rather than deposits: they fall outside deposit-guarantee and investor-compensation schemes, a disclosure MiCA requires providers to make. Price volatility, custody risk, and the dependence on Bitpanda's acceptance criteria all sit with the user, not the bank.
Why This Matters to FinanceX Readers
For banks, the build-versus-buy question on crypto is being settled in favour of buy. When a regulated infrastructure provider can drop trading, custody, and compliance into an existing app, offering digital assets stops being a technology project and becomes a distribution decision, and the competitive pressure to match it grows with every bank that signs.
For investors, the signal is Bitpanda's steady march through European banking: a single B2B supplier is steadily standardising how retail crypto reaches the mass market, which concentrates both the growth and the operational risk in one place. Watch whether Fibank's early-2027 launch date holds, and whether rivals such as Raiffeisen's Bulgarian arm move before it.
