Crypto at Sparkasse and Volksbank: the Costs

Anyone buying bitcoin through a Sparkasse or a Volksbank pays twice: a commission, and a spread on top of it. At Volksbank Raiffeisenbank Wuerzburg the commission stands at 1.5 percent per purchase and per sale, according to its schedule of prices and services for crypto asset trading, with the gap between the buying and the selling price coming on top. The Sparkassen start from mid-October with a flat order fee of 99 cents, likewise plus a spread. On the banks’ own product pages, that figure is as a rule nowhere to be found.

This is not a supposition. On September 6, 2026, cryptoticker.io retrieved and evaluated the crypto product pages of 41 cooperative banks. Seven of those pages were reachable and advertised the offering. Not one of them carried a percentage or a euro amount. Exactly one linked directly to the price schedule.

Two kinds of cost meet in a crypto purchase made through your own bank, and they work differently.

The commission is the fee the bank charges for executing your order. It appears in the schedule of prices and services, it is quantified, and it shows up on your statement as a separate item. At the Wuerzburg cooperative bank it amounts to 1.5 percent of the order volume.

The spread is the difference between the price at which you can buy and the price at which you could sell at that same moment. It never appears on a statement as a fee, because it is not a charge but something priced in. In economic terms you pay it all the same, once on the purchase and again on the sale.

A simple calculation makes the difference clear. On an order of €1,000, the commission of 1.5 percent costs you exactly €15. If the spread adds another one percent, a further €10 falls due that you will find on no invoice. After the purchase, roughly €975 of value sits in your custody account. Sell later, and both items apply again.

Why the bank names one figure and not the other

The commission is a fee charged by the bank, which is why it belongs in the schedule of prices and services. The spread, by contrast, arises at the trading counterparty that quotes the prices. The bank cannot guarantee it as a fixed value, because it moves with market conditions. The banks’ documents therefore carry a note saying that a spread applies in addition to the stated commission, without any order of magnitude being given for it.

That is unobjectionable in legal terms and awkward for the investor all the same: the item you are not given a figure for can be larger than the one you are.

meinKrypto and Krypto powered by Deka: how the banks’ offering is built

Both banking groups have chosen the same blueprint. Trading takes place in the app you already use for your current account, and the crypto assets are held by a specialised custodian.

At the Volksbanken and Raiffeisenbanken the offering is called meinKrypto and runs inside the VR banking app. Which institutions have switched it on is a decision each bank takes for itself; the rollout is spread across the year. How far it has come is traced by cryptoticker.io in a separate overview of meinKrypto from August 23, 2026.

At the Sparkassen the offering is called Krypto powered by Deka, is provided by DekaBank and is embedded in the Sparkasse app. The launch is announced for mid-October 2026, with an internal test phase due to run in September. Bitcoin, ethereum, XRP and solana are to be available when trading opens. Our assessment of that launch is in our article on the planned crypto trading at the Sparkasse from August 16, 2026.

What a custodian does in this chain

A custodian is the service provider that holds the cryptographic keys to your coins and keeps the holdings separate from its own assets. At both banking groups this role is taken by a provider from the Boerse Stuttgart group. You never hold a key yourself. What you hold is a position in your bank’s custody account.

The survey: on how many product pages does the price appear?

cryptoticker.io carried out this evaluation itself on September 6, 2026.

Method: for 41 cooperative banks, the product page on crypto asset trading was retrieved under the path that is uniform across the group, the status code was noted, the visible text was stripped of markup and then searched for percentages, euro amounts and for a link to the schedule of prices and services for crypto asset trading.

Result: 7 of the 41 addresses delivered a reachable product page advertising the offering. On 0 of those 7 was there a percentage or a euro amount for commission or spread. On 1 of the 7, the price schedule for crypto asset trading was linked directly. The remaining 34 addresses returned an error code, maintained no such page, or did not advertise the offering there.

The text on those pages is largely identical across all seven institutions and names the types of cost correctly: a commission applies, plus a spread. A figure is not given there, though the reference to the schedule of prices and services is.

What the Volksbank price schedule says: 1.5 percent and a €10 minimum order

The one directly linked document comes from Volksbank Raiffeisenbank Wuerzburg and is titled schedule of prices and services for crypto asset trading; it is linked on the product page of Volksbank Raiffeisenbank Wuerzburg. Four statements in it count for you before a first purchase.

• Registration for crypto asset trading is free of charge.
• The commission for the commission business on purchases and on sales amounts to 1.5 percent.
• A minimum order size of €10 applies to all purchases. Sales below that threshold are possible if you are closing the entire position.
• The bank additionally charges expenses and third-party costs that are billed to it by others on execution and settlement. On request it will provide the breakdown, so far as it is able to.

The last point is the vaguest. It means that alongside commission and spread a third layer of cost can arise, whose size does not emerge from the document in advance. Whether it arises in practice, and at what level, cannot be answered from the price schedule alone.

One point for context: 1.5 percent is the figure of a single institution. Every cooperative bank is legally independent and sets its own price schedule. For the other six institutions with a reachable product page, no directly linked crypto price schedule was available within this survey, and without a document there is no dependable figure.

The Sparkassen take a different route on the visible part of the price. Instead of a percentage, a flat order fee of 99 cents per trading order is planned, regardless of whether you buy for €100 or for €5,000. These terms were reported by Blocktrainer on July 23, 2026; DekaBank sets the trading fee for the affiliated institutions.

A flat fee behaves entirely differently from a percentage. On an order of €100, 99 cents comes to just under one percent; on €5,000 it is 0.02 percent. Anyone moving large amounts in one go does considerably better on the visible part of the price with the Sparkasse model than with a percentage commission.

The catch sits in the same place as at the Volksbanken: here too a spread comes on top, and here too it has not been quantified so far. That leaves the comparison between the two banking groups only half possible until trading opens. The 99 cents are known. The second item is not.

What that means for choosing your order size

With a flat order fee it pays to buy less often and in larger amounts, because the 99 cents are spread across a bigger sum. With a percentage commission, by contrast, the splitting makes no difference: 1.5 percent stays 1.5 percent, whether you invest €1,200 once or €100 twelve times. Anyone considering a savings plan should know this difference before settling on the interval.

The spread denotes the gap between the buying and the selling price that a trading counterparty quotes at the same time. It is the compensation for someone standing ready at any moment to sell you coins or take them off your hands.

At a classic exchange you see both sides of the order book, and with them the gap. In the app channel of your own bank you generally see a single price you can act on. That a margin is already inside it is standard practice in the industry and is named in the terms. It is not quantified there.

For comparison it helps to look at providers whose pricing model rests on exactly one of those two elements. According to the Handelsblatt crypto exchange comparison, the Bison app works without a classic transaction fee and charges a spread of around 1.25 percent instead; Bitpanda, conversely, levies a flat order fee of 1.49 percent with no additional spread. At the banks, both models meet in one product, and that is the real difference. Which providers in Germany work with which model is set out in our comparison of crypto exchanges.

Work the case through once for an amount many beginners choose. On an order volume of €1,000, the visible costs per purchase come out as follows:

• Volksbank at 1.5 percent commission: €15, plus an unquantified spread.
• Sparkasse from October at a 99-cent order fee: €0.99, plus an unquantified spread.
• Bison at a spread of around 1.25 percent: about €12.50, with no separate transaction fee.
• Bitpanda at a 1.49 percent order fee: €14.90, with no additional spread.

Two things stand out. First, on the quantifiable part the offerings sit close together, with the exception of the Sparkasse order fee, which falls out of line on larger amounts. Second, the comparison stays incomplete as long as the spread figures of the two banking groups are missing. One percent of spread would mean another €10 on €1,000 and would shift the picture noticeably.

At trading platforms there are also costs that arise only on withdrawal: a withdrawal fee charged by the provider and the network fee of the blockchain in question. With the banks’ offerings that question does not arise for the time being, and the reason for that is a different one.

Custody at your bank: why you cannot move your coins to your own wallet

Both banking groups offer the trading as custody account business. Your position is held by a custodian, you receive no private keys and, as a rule, no way to transfer the coins to a self-managed address either. Anyone leaving the offering sells.

For beginners that is an advantage: there is no seed phrase that can be lost and no address that can be mistyped. For anyone wanting to hold their assets themselves over the long term, it is a hard restriction. A sale is a taxable event; a transfer to your own address would not be. If you want to keep that route open, check which providers permit withdrawals to an address of your own, and which hardware wallet is a suitable destination for it.

The question you can put to your bank

Whether your institution provides for a withdrawal to a self-managed address is rarely stated on the product page. It is one of three questions that can be settled before a first purchase: the level of the commission, the order of magnitude of the spread, and whether a transfer to an address of your own is possible at all.

Before your first purchase: how to find your bank’s price schedule

The route is shorter than the search suggests, once you know what to ask for.

At the cooperative institutions, the product page on crypto asset trading carries a reference to the schedule of prices and services. In the survey that reference was present seven times, but only once as a direct link to the bank’s own crypto document. If the reference leads only to the general price display, searching within that document for the keyword crypto asset trading gets you further.

If that route does not get you there, asking your bank is the quickest step. Two pieces of information are worth requesting in writing: the percentage or amount of the commission, and the typical order of magnitude of the spread for the coins you intend to buy. The bank has to carry the first in its price schedule. The second it cannot guarantee, but it can give a range from experience.

Why the effort pays off

On a one-off purchase of €500 the difference runs to a few euros. Anyone investing monthly pays the commission again on every execution date. Over twelve months at €200 each, 1.5 percent adds up to €36 in visible commission alone, with the spread on top. That is the amount a price comparison before the start can bring in.

What this survey does not show: the limits of the exercise

Honesty about a survey of one’s own includes naming its reach.

A single page path, uniform across the group, was tested. Institutions that keep their crypto page at a different address ended up in the count as unreachable, even though they may well have the offering. The figure of 7 is therefore not a statement about how many Volksbanken offer meinKrypto, only about how many of the tested addresses served such a page on that day.

Nor was it tested whether the price schedules of the remaining institutions can be found by other routes, for instance through the general price display. Also open is the actual level of the spread at both banking groups: from the outside it can be measured only in live trading, and for the Sparkassen that begins only in October.

The figure of 1.5 percent comes from the document of a single institution, retrieved on September 6, 2026, and cannot be carried over to the group as a whole. It is a documented individual value, not a group average.

Crypto through your own bank: what to take away

1. Ask for both figures, not just one. Commission and spread are two separate items, and with the banks’ offerings both apply. Knowing only the commission means knowing half the price. How other providers build their model is shown in our comparison of crypto exchanges.
2. Settle before your first purchase whether you can get out again. In the banks’ custody model, the exit is a sale rather than a transfer. If you want to hold your assets yourself, you need a provider that permits withdrawal to an address of your own, and a suitable destination from the hardware wallet comparison.
3. Keep your statements from the very beginning. Acquisition date, price and fees are what you will need later for the tax return, and in a bank custody account you do not get them automatically in the form tax software expects. Suitable tools for that are in the overview of crypto tax tools and portfolio trackers.

For many people their own bank lowers the barrier to entry, because no additional account is needed and the regulation appears settled. You pay for that convenience through two layers of cost, only one of which is disclosed. Anyone who works it out once before the first purchase then decides with the full set of figures.

(As of September 6, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

Transparency note: This article was produced with the assistance of artificial intelligence and reviewed by our editorial team before publication. All figures and claims were checked against the primaryI

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Source: cryptoticker.io