The most crypto-friendly online banks

The financial system is changing, and some of the most crypto-friendly online banks are working every day so that financial decentralization can be embraced and used by many more users. 

The goals they are working hard on are:

• more user-friendly interface;
• system requiring less energy expenditure, a goal that will be achieved with the long-awaited Merge.

The interesting intermediate step between a traditional banking system and a totally decentralized system is definitely online banks.

Banks with more cutting-edge services and usage systems that distinguish themselves by efficiency and speed.

Online banks, contrary to popular belief, are very safe because they are born on the web and know the risks of the Internet. They use special encryption programs that allow access only to secure sites!

In addition, banking groups that do mainly digital business have a limited number of physical locations and staff, thus fewer expenses to deal with. For this reason, digital service is cheaper than traditional service.

The ranking of the most crypto-friendly banks

Let’s have a look together at which online banks are the most widely used.

Revolut 

Revolut tops the list.

The company is based in the United Kingdom and offers many banking services, including prepaid debit card, currency exchange, cryptocurrency exchange, and peer-to-peer payments. 

It was founded in 2015 in London. Despite Brexit, the company has found a way to maintain and provide quick and easy access to its international customers by securing a Challenger bank license from the ECB, facilitated by the Bank of Lithuania.

The Revolut mobile app supports ATM spending and withdrawals in 120 currencies and allows money to be sent in 29 currencies directly from the app.

Revolut thus emerges as the most searched online banking service in Europe, receiving the most searches in as many as 25 countries.

As many as 71,000 average monthly searches were recorded in Germany and Spain. In Switzerland, on the other hand, 25,000 average monthly searches. 

The popular fintech app also announced in August that it had received permission from the EEA regulator to sell Bitcoin in Europe and England through its app.

The EEA in which Revolut will be able to operate includes 27 countries including also the UK, Iceland, Norway and Liechtenstein.

Specifically, permission to operate was given to Revolut by CYSEC, or the Securities and Exchange Commission of Cyprus, and Bitcoin will be precisely sold through a hub that the company will open in the country.

Wise

Second on the list is Wise, most searched in nine countries.

The British multinational company, based in London, was founded by two Estonians.

Wise is the second most searched online bank in 18 countries, including Hungary, Greece and Portugal, while it is third in five other countries. 

Overall, Wise has 338,080 average monthly searches in Europe.

N26

N26, on the other hand, comes in third place, being the most searched in four countries.

The bank under review is headquartered in Berlin, Germany, was founded in 2013, and offers financial services to customers in various member states of the Single Euro Payments Area and the United States. 

However, operations in the United Kingdom were suspended in April 2020 due to uncertainties over Brexit.

N26 ranks third in being the most searched in four European countries-Andorra, Austria, San Marino, and Slovenia-and second most searched in four other countries, including Belgium and Luxembourg.

N26 co-founder Max Tayenthal admitted a few months ago that he would have to prioritize the expansion of his services, including cryptocurrency trading.

In practice, Max Tayenthal earlier this year confirmed that N26’s geographic expansion, which focused more on expansion than on the type of services it offered, including crypto, did not prove to be a winning strategy. 

Here are what his words had been:

“Should we have built trading and crypto instead of launching in the US? In hindsight, it might have been a smart idea.”

Conclusions of the analysis

The data just presented was collected by spread betting broker CMC Markets. The latter analyzed a comprehensive list of online banking services available in Europe through Ahrefs to find out the average number of monthly searches each bank receives in each European country.

As a reminder, CMC Markets is a UK-based financial services company that offers online derivatives trading such as spread betting and contracts for differences between world markets such as equities and foreign exchange.