Santander Brazil to Launch Crypto Trading Feature in Coming Months, CEO Says

This article is adapted from CoinDesk Brasil, a partnership between CoinDesk and InfoMoney, one of Brazil's leading financial news publications. Follow CoinDesk Brasil on Twitter.

Spanish banking multinational Santander (SAN) plans to offer crypto trading to its clients in Brazil in the coming months, Santander Brazil CEO Mario Leao said on Thursday.

The bank plans to launch crypto-related services and could provide further news about the initiative in the company's next earnings release, in mid-October, Folha de S. Paulo newspaper reported.

“We recognize that it is a market that is here to stay, and it is not necessarily a reaction to competitors positioning themselves. It is simply a vision that our client has demand for this type of asset, so we have to find the most correct and most educational way to do it,” Leao said.

Santander has already made inroads with crypto in Latin America this year. In March, it launched loans in Argentina for farmers collateralized with tokenized commodities in partnership with Agrotoken, an Argentina-based agricultural commodities tokenization platform.

Read more: Why Brazil Is the Big Latin American Bet for Global Crypto Exchanges

Several non-crypto financial companies have announced or started operating crypto ventures in Brazil recently. In July, the Brazilian fintech PicPay announced its plans to launch a crypto exchange and a Brazilian real-tied stablecoin in 2022. In December, Mercado Libre, Latin America’s largest e-commerce company by market value, started allowing users in Brazil to buy, sell and hold cryptocurrencies.

On Tuesday, Nubank, the largest Brazilian digital bank by market value, announced it reached one million users on its crypto trading platform just one month after launching in June.

This article was translated by Andrés Engler and edited by CoinDesk. The original Portuguese can be found here.