St.Galler Kantonalbank
St.Galler Kantonalbank is the cantonal bank of St. Gallen, founded in 1868 and listed on SIX Swiss Exchange since 2001. The canton holds the majority of its shares and guarantees its liabilities. Since 2023 its private clients domiciled in Switzerland can buy, hold and sell bitcoin and ether, and the coins appear in their asset overview and tax statement next to their other investments.
The bank does not hold the coins itself and leaves the custody to specialized service providers in Switzerland that FINMA supervises. Clients place crypto orders only through their advisor during business hours, so trading at weekends is not possible. The bank prices the positions in US dollars and charges a transaction fee and an annual custody fee.
Crypto at the SGKB: bitcoin and ether
St.Galler Kantonalbank offers two cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin and Ether, for long-term investment. Clients must be natural persons domiciled in Switzerland, hold a custody account without advisory mandate and already keep other investment products at the bank. The bank publishes a product sheet for each coin, and the sheets of August 2026 explain the technology, the market and the risks of each one.
When the offer started in 2023, the bank worked with SEBA Bank, today named AMINA Bank, according to reports at the time.
Fees and conditions for crypto trading
The SGKB charges a transaction fee of 1.00 percent on each crypto trade and a custody fee of 0.60 percent a year, and it keeps and values the positions in US dollars. Orders run only during the opening hours of the bank, and the risk notes explain that this can lead to losses when prices move sharply at night or at weekends.
Custody by supervised service providers
The bank keeps the coins of its clients with specialized sub-custodians in Switzerland under FINMA supervision. If such a sub-custodian goes bankrupt, the coins held for SGKB clients can be separated as client assets under the Swiss Debt Enforcement and Bankruptcy Act and the Banking Act. The risk notes still name hacking and fraud as risks that crypto custody cannot fully exclude.
Upcoming crypto and digital asset events in Switzerland
Head office in St. Gallen and branches
St.Galler Kantonalbank AG has its head office at St. Leonhard-Strasse 25, 9001 St. Gallen, and runs 38 branches with more than a thousand employees. FINMA licenses and supervises the bank, and the canton of St. Gallen is liable for all its liabilities that its own funds do not cover, except subordinated loans and share capital.
Shareholders and the SGKB share
The bank is a company under Swiss private law and is entered in the cantonal commercial register. Its share has traded on SIX Swiss Exchange in Zurich since 2 April 2001, the cantonal law requires the canton to hold at least 51 percent of the share capital, and Moody's rates the bank regularly.
St.Galler Kantonalbank Deutschland in Munich and Frankfurt
Since 2009 the group has owned a German subsidiary, St.Galler Kantonalbank Deutschland AG, which manages assets for wealthy private clients and institutions in Germany. It has its seat in Munich and a second office in Frankfurt am Main, and it works only in the investment business. The crypto offer of the Swiss parent bank is open only to clients domiciled in Switzerland.
St.Galler Kantonalbank and Finance Loop
Banks, asset managers and fintechs in the Finance Loop network deal with the services that St.Galler Kantonalbank provides, such as bitcoin and ether for advisory clients held with supervised sub-custodians. Finance Loop discusses these services in the Investment & Digital Assets track and the rules behind them in the Risk & Compliance track.
Finance Loop is a professional network and has the goal of driving the institutional use of emerging technologies in finance, such as AI, tokenization, stablecoins, and DeFi. Finance Loop helps its members build skills and personal networks in these fields: Investment & Digital Assets, Payments & Digital Money, Digital Infrastructure & Sovereignty, and Risk & Compliance.