BW-Bank Opens Bitcoin Trading Inside the Securities Account: What to Check Before Your First Buy

Since September 9, 2026, customers of BW-Bank have been able to buy and sell crypto assets through their existing securities account. Access runs through BW Nextbroker, while execution and custody sit with the Austrian provider Bitpanda. Anyone planning to use it should settle three questions first: who the contractual counterparty is, where the crypto assets actually sit, and who declares the tax. All three answers turn out differently from what the familiar securities-account setting suggests.

What BW-Bank has offered since September 9, 2026

The LBBW group is extending its work with Bitpanda Enterprise into retail banking. Until now the partnership, agreed in April 2024, covered corporate banking, with custody and trading for companies. After a pilot phase that started in late July 2026 and was open to selected retail clients at first, the offering is now open to BW-Bank retail customers in Germany.

Rainer Zeeb, head of the securities department at BW-Bank, is quoted in the release of September 9 saying the cooperation gives customers convenient access to crypto assets. Nadeem Ladki, Global Head of Bitpanda Enterprise, places digital assets as a fixed part of the investment world. Bitpanda supplies the technical infrastructure for trading and custody through the relevant group company.

The move stands out because this is a Landesbank, a German state bank, and not a neobroker. Crypto custody is a licensed activity in Germany, and since MiCA has applied in full across the EU, only authorised providers may offer crypto services. Bitpanda says it has held a MiCA licence from BaFin since January 2025. The bank therefore does not act as custodian; it opens a route inside its own interface.

The ten crypto assets available in BW Nextbroker

BW-Bank's product page names the tradable assets. There are ten of them: Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Ripple (XRP), Solana (SOL), Litecoin (LTC), Chainlink (LINK), Cardano (ADA), Tron (TRX), Polkadot (DOT) and Hedera (HBAR).

That selection is small next to what specialist trading venues list. For most investors it covers the bulk of the market by market capitalisation. Anyone who wants to hold one particular smaller token will not find it here and will still need an account with a specialist crypto exchange. Whether the list will be extended, the bank does not say.

The route in comes with conditions. You need a securities account at BW-Bank and an activated Nextbroker login. From Nextbroker you are forwarded to the integrated Bitpanda platform, where buying, selling and administration take place. The bank's regular Nextbroker page, incidentally, does not carry crypto assets in its own list of products; it names equities, bonds, ETFs, funds and certificates. Crypto sits there as a separate menu item of its own.

Your counterparty is Bitpanda, not the bank: what that means for you

The most important sentence in the whole offering stands in the bank's own notes. The contractual counterparty for the crypto business is Bitpanda GmbH, or a group company named in its terms of business. BW-Bank is explicitly not a party to that agreement.

This is not a formality. It answers the question of whom you turn to in a dispute. With a faulty securities order the bank is your counterpart, and the familiar routes of complaint and arbitration apply. With a crypto order in the same interface it is the crypto service provider. The term that describes this is intermediation: the bank provides the access, the contract forms between you and the provider.

In practice that means reading Bitpanda's terms of business before you place your first order, not your bank's. They set out which law applies, which entity you are dealing with and how complaints are handled. That the same construction now turns up at several German institutions is something we worked through on September 6 for Sparkasse and Volksbank; the fee models there differ considerably from trading on an exchange.

Custody without your own wallet: who holds your keys

Bitpanda holds the crypto assets you buy. That puts the private key with the provider, not with you. In technical terms this is custodial storage: a third party holds the keys and keeps internal records of who is owed what amount. The counterpart would be self-custody on a hardware wallet of your own, where nobody but you has access.

For many newcomers custody by a provider is the more comfortable route, because no key can go missing. The price for that is counterparty risk: if the custodian runs into difficulty, access to your holding hangs on how that is wound up. Anyone who does not want that needs the option of moving holdings out to an address of their own.

And this is exactly where a question stays open. BW-Bank's product page says nothing about withdrawals to an external wallet. It describes buying, selling and administration within the platform. Whether a transfer to an address you control is possible, and on what terms, is something you have to clarify with the bank or in the provider's conditions before your first purchase. For self-custody that is the decisive question.

Order limits in the securities account: 1 euro minimum, 50,000 euros per trade

The bank names clear amount limits for crypto trading. The minimum stake per order is 1 euro. At the top end a single order is capped at 50,000 euros, and 500,000 euros are possible per day.

The low minimum amount is practical for small, regular purchases. The daily cap will never become an issue for the vast majority of retail investors. More relevant is the limit per order for anyone who wants to move larger amounts in one go: a position of 120,000 euros cannot be built in a single step but breaks into several orders, each with its own transaction fee and its own execution price.

Anyone who wants to buy on an ongoing basis should also check whether an automated savings plan is offered or whether every instalment has to be triggered by hand. The product page describes single orders; it does not list a crypto savings plan.

What the transaction fee costs, and why the bank does not name it

For every executed crypto order, buy as well as sell, BW-Bank says a transaction fee is charged by Bitpanda. The bank does not give a figure for it. It points to the provider's fee page.

That is an important difference from the securities business, where the bank's schedule of prices and services fixes the costs. With crypto assets, pricing authority sits with the provider, and a fee schedule can change without the bank having to change anything. So take the fee page in hand yourself shortly before your first purchase instead of lifting a figure from a review.

Watch two items that can arise separately: the stated transaction fee and the spread, meaning the gap between the buying and the selling price. The spread appears in no fee table as a percentage, yet it works like a mark-up on the price. With the offerings from Sparkassen and Volksbanken it was exactly this combination of commission and spread that made up the gap to a specialist trading platform.

Deposit protection and crypto assets: why the securities-account setting gives no cover here

Because the access sits inside the securities account, a mistaken assumption suggests itself: that crypto assets thereby fall under the same protection as cash balances and securities. That is not the case. Deposit protection covers bank balances, meaning money in an account. Securities in a custody account are segregated assets and belong to you anyway, not to the bank.

Crypto assets are neither the one nor the other. They are not a bank balance and so are not captured by deposit protection. What happens if the custodian becomes insolvent hangs on its custody model and on the legal system it is subject to. BW-Bank points out explicitly that crypto assets can be subject to extreme price swings that may lead to the total loss of the capital invested.

That is not an argument against the offering, but it is an argument for not treating the holding as safer just because it turns up next to equities and funds in the same view. The interface is shared; the legal position is not.

Crypto capital gains tax at a bank: why nothing is withheld at source

With equities and funds in the custody account of a German bank, taxation runs largely automatically: the institution withholds capital gains tax and passes it on. With crypto assets, under the law as it stands, that is different. Gains from a sale count as private disposal transactions under section 23 of the Income Tax Act, and there is no tax withheld at source.

Concretely, that means you declare the transactions yourself in your tax return, in the Anlage SO schedule. For that you need the acquisition date, acquisition cost, disposal date and disposal proceeds for each position. The bank and the provider explicitly do not provide tax advice, and a ready-made tax certificate of the kind you get in the securities business is not envisaged for this part.

Anyone holding crypto assets through several routes, say through the bank access and additionally at an exchange, should bring the records together from the start. After the fact, acquisition dates can often only be reconstructed laboriously, and those are exactly what decides tax exemption. A portfolio tracker with a tax function takes that bookkeeping off your hands. That a securities-account setting means no automatic withholding is something we already took apart on August 27 using the example of equity accounts at crypto exchanges; the direction there is reversed, the risk of confusion the same.

The December 31, 2026 cut-off: why the acquisition date counts

The taxation of crypto assets is currently being decided anew, and the timing of your purchase could become the decisive factor in it. A departmental draft from the Federal Ministry of Finance dated September 8, 2026 would treat crypto assets in future as income from capital assets, with flat-rate withholding tax regardless of the holding period. Under the draft this would capture only crypto assets acquired after December 31, 2026.

None of that is settled. The draft is in early coordination within the federal government, no bill is before the Bundestag, and the one-year holding period under section 23 of the Income Tax Act continues to apply unchanged. What is known about it we wrote up in detail on September 8 under the title "Crypto holding period and grandfathering".

For you, what follows from that is no rush to buy, but care in documenting. Record the date, quantity and price for every acquisition, whatever route you buy through. Should a cut-off date become law, this record is exactly what decides which regime applies to which position.

Bank or crypto exchange: the questions to settle before your first purchase

Access through your own bank has a real advantage: one interface, one login, a known counterpart for the rest of your investments. Against that stand points you have to check actively, because the familiar setting hides them.

cryptoticker.io compiled this assessment itself on September 10, 2026. It rests on the publicly available BW-Bank product page on the crypto cooperation and its Nextbroker page, both retrieved with HTTP 200 on that day, plus the release of September 9, 2026. Five points were checked: tradable assets, access requirements, contractual counterparty, custody and amount limits. Not verifiable were the actual level of the transaction fee, the spread and the question of whether withdrawals to an external wallet are possible; on all three the product page gives no information.

Four questions to your bank or to the provider are therefore worth asking before your first purchase: how high is the transaction fee for the order size you are planning? How wide is the spread at the moment of execution? Is a transfer to a wallet address of your own possible? And what statement do you get at the end of the year in order to declare the transactions in the Anlage SO schedule?

Checking the BW-Bank crypto securities account: what to take away

1. Settle who your counterpart is before you order. The contractual counterparty is the crypto service provider; the bank explicitly is not. Read its terms, and compare the cost frame with what a specialist trading platform charges for the same order.
2. Ask about withdrawals to an address of your own. If they are not offered, your holding stays in third-party custody permanently. Anyone who wants to hold the keys themselves needs a different route for that and a suitable hardware wallet.
3. Keep clean acquisition records from the start. No withholding at source means the burden of proof sits with you. A tax and portfolio tool collects the acquisition date and cost for each position while the data is still retrievable.

Sources to read up on: the BW-Bank product page on the crypto cooperation and the report of September 9, 2026 in IT-Finanzmagazin.

(As of September 10, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)