$88B valued Italian bank, Banca Generali, has announced a collaboration with Conio (a crypto platform) to provide BTC-related services to its more than 300K customers. Once the partnership details are finalized, the bank’s customers can create a BTC wallet from their bank app. 

The Conio-Banca Generali Partnership

Besides having the requisite tech support and experience, Banca Generali is partnering with Conio because it is a majority shareholder of the company and is owned by Italians. Discussion about this partnership has been ongoing for more than a year before the launch of the feature early this year.

A local Italian newspaper reported that “Banca Generali customers won’t need any other environment or download any other feature to their mobile banking app before they can perform BTC transactions. The only difference will be the addition of multiple signatures and other personal authentication to enhance the security of users’ details and funds. More importantly, users save the transaction costs as they won’t need to use their credit cards for any part of their transactions. Also, their data remains private as they won’t have to expose their private info on third-party sites.”

Speaking with local media, the bank’s chief operating officer, Riccardo Renna, said, “apart from ensuring that our customers can perform BTC transactions on the bank’s app.” “Part of our discussion with Conio also involved how the bank can help users recover their wallets in unique situations; for example, when there is a succession. Eventually, Conio came up with a solution of allowing us to keep each user’s third security key which we will provide to them in the extreme case where that becomes necessary,” he added.

Conio’s Feature Extended To Other Financial Platforms

Asides from Banca Generali, Hype challenger bank, has also deployed Conio’s feature on its platform for its users. Through Conio’s wallet on Hype app, Hype users can buy or sell BTC from their dashboard to non-Hype users, and where necessary, access recovery data for their wallet’s private keys.

It is important to note that Banca Generali didn’t mention whether the bank’s users can send BTC to non-Banca Generali users. Also, it didn’t specify whether there is more than one private key in the multi-signature setup.

BTC-Related Services In Financial Institutions

Several top financial institutions are also making plans to incorporate BTC-related services. A few weeks ago, Germany’s 440-bank conglomerate (better known as Sparkasse) announced the addition of BTC services for bank clients that belong to the conglomerate.

Once this implementation becomes successful, data estimates show that nearly 55 million persons across all the banks will perform crypto-related transactions. After the Sparkasse announcement, two other German-based banks disclosed the implementation of similar features for their customers.

Lately, a US bank and crypto service provider, Bakkt, announced a collaboration that will enable the bank’s users to start performing crypto transactions from the bank’s app. Today, BTC price has lost nearly 8% after suffering price correction from a bullish move resulting from a BTC whale activity late last month. As of this writing, the leading cryptocurrency trades at $45.96k.