The economics of crypto brokerage for banks
When a bank decides to offer crypto to its customers, the first question that reaches the steering committee is usually build or buy. It is the wrong first question. By choosing an operating model the bank has already decided who sets customer pricing, who keeps the brokerage economics those customers generate, who owns the proposition, and who pays to run the market infrastructure underneath it.
Those four things do not move together. A model that minimises implementation effort can also minimise the bank's share of the economics. A model that maximises control can leave the bank running an exchange-grade stack it never wanted. Crypto brokerage for banks is a margin decision dressed up as an integration decision.
Three ways a bank can approach crypto brokerage
Each of the three routes is a legitimate choice for the right bank; the aim is to show what is traded away in each case, not to rank them. The broker-dealer's guide to crypto market entry covers the operational differences between white-label, internalised, and hybrid models in more depth, so this discussion stays on the economics.
White-label
A white-label provider supplies most of the proposition and the service behind it, and the bank presents it under its own brand. Internal build is comparatively low, the route to market is simpler, and the bank operates little of the infrastructure. For a bank that wants a crypto tab in the app with limited investment, or that is testing demand before committing, this is a rational choice.
The trade-off is structural. The provider has its own commercial model, so part of the economics generated by the bank's customers sits outside the bank. Pricing is often set or bounded by the provider, and the customer experience is shaped by what the provider's platform can do. Contracts vary widely, so the bank should model what it actually retains at scale, and what it would have to rebuild if it changed providers.
Own proposition, outsourced market infrastructure
Here the bank owns the customer relationship, the brand, the product, and the pricing decisions, and contracts with a specialist counterparty for what sits behind the proposition: market access, execution, custody, and reporting. The bank is the brokerage; the counterparty is its route to the market, is not a consumer brand, and the customer never needs to know it exists. In shorthand: the bank's offering, the counterparty's market access.
The bank sets the customer spread and fee and keeps what is left after the agreed cost of the counterparty's services. It does not have to recreate venue connectivity, routing, settlement, or custody operations. What it does take on is the customer-facing layer, onboarding and suitability, and the regulatory perimeter of being the brokerage of record.
Full build
The third route is to build the stack in-house: venue accounts, connectivity, an execution layer, treasury across those venues, custody, reconciliation, and the team to run it continuously. For a bank with a large existing markets business, in-house digital asset expertise, and a long horizon, it can be the right answer.
The cost is that the bank becomes a market infrastructure operator. Pre-funding across venues ties up capital, every venue integration is a live dependency needing counterparty review, and custody is a specialist discipline with its own governance weight. These are standing operating costs, not a project budget.
Who keeps the brokerage economics
Set the three routes against the four questions from the introduction.
On pricing control, white-label sits at one end, with the provider's model shaping what the bank can charge, and full build at the other. The middle route puts pricing with the bank, subject only to the counterparty's cost, which is agreed and stated separately from the market price.
On revenue retention, the same order holds, with a caveat that tends to get missed. A full build retains all of the gross economics and then spends a material part of them running infrastructure. The middle route retains the customer economics and pays an agreed cost for the market layer. Which comes out ahead depends on volume and the bank's cost of running a markets operation, and a bank at the scale to make a full build pay usually already knows it.
On customer ownership, white-label can leave the bank with a brand on someone else's product. The other two routes leave the bank owning the proposition outright.
On infrastructure burden, white-label and the middle route are both light on the bank. The difference is what the lightness buys. Under white-label the bank has outsourced the proposition; under the middle route it has outsourced the plumbing. That distinction is the whole argument.
What outsourcing the market layer involves
A bank taking the middle route is buying more than venue connectivity: execution across venues, custody for the assets its customers hold, settlement, and the reporting that lets it reconcile and evidence execution quality. There is a longer treatment of what a crypto prime broker should provide beyond market access, covering API connectivity, reconciliation, and governance.
Execution quality needs particular attention because the bank is putting its name to something it does not operate. An agency model, in which the counterparty routes client orders across venues rather than trading against them from a proprietary book and returns venue-level fills, lets the bank see where each order went. What the bank needs is the ability to assess and evidence the result; the questions to ask are in how institutions should assess crypto best execution.
The regulatory position for EU banks
A credit institution does not need a separate CASP authorisation to provide crypto-asset services in the EU. Under MiCA Article 60(1) it may provide them after notifying its home competent authority at least 40 working days before doing so for the first time, with the information listed in Article 60(7): a programme of operations, internal controls, segregation and custody arrangements, anti-money-laundering controls, and ICT systems, among other items. The content is detailed in Commission Delegated Regulation (EU) 2025/303. ESMA Q&A 2088 confirms a credit institution can provide any crypto-asset service by this route, and notes that the notification must still fit within national rules implementing the Capital Requirements Directive, so the scope of the existing banking licence matters.
Two cautions. The 40 working days is an advance notification period, not a launch timetable, and the authority will assess whether the notification is complete before it counts. And the route is narrower for entities that are not credit institutions: an investment firm may only notify for services equivalent to its MiFID permissions, and an e-money institution only for custody and transfer of the e-money tokens it issues. A digital bank operating as an EMI should check which it is before assuming the route applies.
Whatever the route, a bank in the middle model is the regulated brokerage in its own right, should expect its counterparty to be authorised for the services it provides, and should verify the entity and those services on the AMF white list and ESMA's register rather than rely on any provider's description. Aplo SAS, for its part, holds MiCA CASP authorisation from the AMF in France and has requested passporting to seven further EU markets.
The decision behind the decision
The bank that gets this right starts from the revenue line it wants to own in three years and works back to the model, rather than starting from the integration it can deliver this quarter. White-label answers the second question well and may be the right first step. It answers the first poorly, and switching later means rebuilding a proposition customers already associate with the bank.
The middle route deserves serious modelling by any bank that expects crypto to be a durable part of its offering rather than a feature. It keeps pricing and the customer relationship inside the bank, moves the infrastructure cost to a counterparty whose business is running it, and leaves the bank with the regulatory work it would carry under any model where it is the brokerage of record.
Review the economics behind your crypto model
If your bank is comparing a white-label proposition with owning the customer brokerage relationship, speak with Aplo about the market access, execution, and custody model behind the latter.