Overview
- Banca Sella completed its MiCA notification and received Bank of Italy clearance on May 27, 2026, making it the first Italian bank to take that regulatory step.
- The bank's initial offering is limited to custody, receipt and transfer of crypto-assets and does not include trading in its first phase.
- Banca Sella built its setup from years of experimentation and pilots, including the 2022 Fintech Milano Hub DLT work and a July 2025 internal custody pilot using Fireblocks, and it pairs custody with Chainalysis compliance tools.
- The bank plans a phased rollout for selected corporate and institutional clients by the end of 2026 and remains a founding member of Qivalis, a 37-bank group working on a euro stablecoin that needs Dutch regulator approval.
- Regulators used MiCA's notification route for credit institutions to allow faster market entry with a lighter review than non-bank authorizations, a dynamic that is encouraging more European banks to build tokenization and stablecoin services while U.S. federal rules remain unsettled.