It makes a lot of sense for a Bank to sell Bitcoin.
But why would make it sense from a customer point of view?
The easing of the monetary economic policy imposed by the European central bank was a response to the sluggish German manufacturing export market. Banking in Europe has been sluggish for years due to the environment of low-interest rates. Interest in the euro area user countries has touched 0% since 2012 and was at a negative level in 2014. Conditions that lasted for years have attacked banking profits and cast doubt on banking profitability, especially in Germany.
It is proven that some banks have to reduce their employees due to the implementation of negative interest rates. To anticipate this problem in particular so as not to fail, the Bank must consolidate and they must change the business model radically. The banking service program diversification that penetrated the cryptocurrency certainly made a fresh breeze for the banking industry. The Bank combines the guarantee of the safety of customer funds and the progress of blockchain technology is a marketing concept that will attract many benefits for banks.
Banks can collapse if we stop saving money in banks and stop using banking services. Or at least don't make a bank loan to support our lifestyle, a lifestyle that must adjust our abilities. By minimizing the function of banks in our lives the longer the bank will increasingly lose the market.
I would say that the QE in Europe was done, stripping out the marketing by the ECB to make this acceptable by the general public, with the sole aim of saving European Banks from collapse.
This is because there was a massive exposure, for a variety of reasons it's not worth examining here, of banks toward European Sovereign debt. When the there was a Euro confidence crisis, debt of European Nations, which back in time were heavily in debt, all of them (situation has not improved since then, bar Germany).
So ECB started accepting those debt held by banks, in exchange to fresh money, they could have in theory used to fuel real growth.
What happened instead is that not only Banks benefited from ECB money printing, but they used that money to buy even more debt only to profit from rising prices, using free money from the ECB.
Regarding consolidations and "traditional" ways of improving efficiency, I think European banks have gone far enough. Everyday we read on newspapers that bigger banks are buying (or forced to buy) smaller banks, closing branches and laying off employees in the thousands.
Yes, they need to embrace digital more, opening their expertise to new markets like cryptos. But they have the burden of regulations, and regulators (namely ECB) which are literally scared of anything related to crypts.
As per this news something is beginning to change, and I think it's a very welcome news as this might seem a little movement in hte regulatory framework, while it's a massive paradigm shift.
