Raiffeisen Bank partners with Bitpanda to bring digital asset trading to 18 million customers across Central and Eastern Europe

Raiffeisen Bank International is taking crypto mainstream in a corner of the world that most Western fintech firms have largely overlooked. The Austrian banking giant announced a partnership with Bitpanda Enterprise on September 23, 2026, that will eventually let its 18 million retail customers across Central and Eastern Europe buy digital assets directly through their local Raiffeisen banks.

How the deal actually works

The structure is a classic white-label arrangement. Bitpanda handles the hard parts: trading infrastructure, custody, and compliance. RBI’s subsidiary banks take care of the customer relationship, deciding what products to offer and when to launch them based on local regulatory conditions.

That decentralized rollout approach is deliberate. Each local bank operates under a different regulatory regime, and what is permissible in, say, Slovakia may look quite different from the rules governing a Raiffeisen subsidiary in Bosnia. By letting each bank set its own product scope and timeline, the partnership avoids the trap of a single regulatory snag derailing the entire program.

Bitpanda’s white-label model is not new territory for the company. The Vienna-based firm previously struck a similar deal with the German neobank N26, among other institutional partners. But the RBI arrangement is meaningfully larger in geographic reach, covering 11 markets simultaneously under a single framework agreement.

Austria already ran the experiment

This is not RBI’s first encounter with Bitpanda. Earlier integrations in Austria gave the partnership a live testing ground before the broader CEE rollout was even contemplated. During preliminary testing in Vienna in early 2024, adoption rates among eligible customers hit roughly 10%.

The early Austrian results also gave RBI’s new CEO, Michael Höllerer, a data point to point to when making the case for a wider rollout. This partnership is described as one of the first major strategic moves under his leadership, which means the Austrian numbers were presumably good enough to justify putting institutional weight behind scaling it.

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