Societe Generale To Offer Bitcoin Trading & Custody

Societe Generale has become the first company in France to secure a license for Bitcoin services and will offer trading and custody to its customers. This significant achievement marks a new era in the French Bitcoin landscape, as it joins a global trend of financial institutions such as BlackRock, Fidelity, Vanguard and others continuing to embrace the industry.

A License to Innovate

The license granted by France’s AMF market regulator empowers SocGen to offer a range of services, including custody, trading, and sales. While numerous firms have registered with the AMF, including the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, Binance, licensed banks like SocGen are held to a higher standard. They are subject to more stringent rules in areas of corporate governance and compliance.

Quiet Bitcoin Takeover by Trad-Fi?

Many within the Bitcoin Industry have long suspected a quiet takeover of the industry by traditional finance to be inevitable, and also behind regulators being slow to provide clarity in order for the industry to move forward.

Regulators and politicians have often conflated Bitcoin with crypto. Whether deliberate or through naiveté, the effect has been to burden Bitcoin’s reputation with the frauds perpetuated by crypto operators like FTX, Celsius and others, whose collapse brought on the longest bear market in Bitcoin’s 14 year history.

It may well turn out that regulators will indeed favour traditional financial institutions, ostensibly because of better oversight and compliance. Nevertheless, regulated banks have been among the most egregious offenders of money laundering laws as well as breaches of customer data privacy, and lax KYC practices.