Actually, Bitcoin's motto is "money without bank". The Dutch Rabobank may soon turn it into a "bank of crypto money" by offering its clients a wallet for cryptocurrencies, as discussed.
There are ideas that I have been waiting for for a long time. Just as it is normal for a fruit merchant to add new fruits to their assortment, it should be natural for a bank to bring new currencies and transaction systems into their online environment. So far, however, the interest of banks in cryptocurrencies is extremely limited. In the best-of-the-best case, they have tentatively begun to approach Bitcoin and other coins as an investment product in recent years.
It is possible that this will change in the near future. Because the Dutch Rabobank seems to have taken a first step to integrate a wallet for cryptocurrencies in their online platform. As part of a "Moonshot" (moon flight) called internal innovation program (Google translator), the bank's employees have developed various ideas to meet the needs of customers. One of 22 ideas in the race is Rabobit - an online cryptocurrency wallet that will be part of the bank's online environment. Currently, the team is still evaluating whether there is interest from customers. At the end of March, it will then be decided whether Rabobit will be shortlisted for the projects to be implemented.
Confusingly, there is already a website called Rabobit.nl that offers an online cryptocurrency wallet on behalf of the bank. It promises to store cryptocurrencies in a wallet in the safe environment of the bank, to have bank and crypto accounts in the same place, to simply add cryptocurrencies to the banking apps already in use and to be able to use the coins directly from the bank account. Anyone attempting to sign up, however, apparently ends up only on the e-mail distribution list. This suggests that the site was set up to evaluate customer interest rather than, as many fear, a fraud.
Rabobank has written an article about cryptocurrencies in the past. When exactly, is unfortunately not on the website. For a bank, the institute expressed itself extremely positively about Bitcoin and Co.: "We are currently experiencing the beginning of a new phenomenon, which according to experts and investors can be compared with the Internet of the 90s. The formation of user-friendly applications has just begun. We see more than one occasion as a threat [...] The old and the new world will have to come closer to each other. "
Rabobank is the second largest bank in the Netherlands with 7.4 million Dutch customers. Until the beginning of 2016, it was still an association of local cooperative banks, after which the 106 cooperatives joined together to form a large cooperative. Rabobank is active primarily in the private customer business, but also as a financial service provider in the agricultural and food industry. What huge potential lies in the fact that Rabobank brings Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies to its millions of customers does not have to be specifically mentioned.
