Online bank Swissquote opened its banking doors to accommodate Bitcoin trading accounts for its clients in July of 2017. It was thought to be the first European online bank to do this.
A year on, and Swissquote has revealed the fruits of its labor for adopting the cryptocurrency with a 44% surge in profits attributed to the “Crypto Boom” in the early half of 2018.
According to Finews, the online bank’s massive growth in Q1 2018 was thanks to a “brisk demand” for crypto products and the eruption of the crypto markets earlier this year.
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Swissquote Profit
The profit was $26.01 million in the first half of 2018 representing a whopping 44% increase over the previous year. The bank sharply increased in trader activity and new customer accounts also.
But this is not the first time, the bank has seen its earnings soar because of Bitcoin. In January it was “swamped with interest” in Bitcoin trading as, according to Swissquote, “several thousand new account applications [were] being submitted every week.”
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To be more precise, in the first half of 2018, the number of customer accounts in Swissquote’s commercial sector increased by 16,278. But not only an increase in accounts, the bank saw the average transaction amount grow to 11.8 transactions, which is a considerable jump when compared to the previous year’s one transaction over the same period.
Since beginning its cryptocurrency adoption in 2017 with Bitcoin, Swissquote expanded its offering and by December 2017, it had added support for four other major cryptocurrencies; Ethereum, Litecoin, Ripple and Bitcoin Cash.
Last March, it introduced an exchange-traded product (ETP) that tracks a multi-cryptocurrency index. Swissquote’s crypto ETP is listed on the country’s largest stock exchange, the Six Swiss Exchange.
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