FNB has launched cryptocurrency trading on its share trading platform, in partnership with South African crypto exchange VALR. Clients can buy and sell five crypto assets, bitcoin, ether, XRP, solana and the dollar-pegged USDT stablecoin, from as little as R10.

The assets are available across FNB's Share Saver, Share Builder, Share Investor and Share Zero products, and purchases are paid for from clients' FNB accounts.

The detail that matters is that the crypto stays inside FNB. Trading is ringfenced within the bank's ecosystem, so clients cannot withdraw coins to their own wallet or another exchange, and cannot bring in crypto they already hold elsewhere. FNB says this is for platform security and a more conservative approach to compliance and exchange control laws.

That makes it a different model from Discovery Bank's, which announced last November that it would offer crypto trading through Luno, with clients linking or opening a Luno account and moving money between it and their bank account.

Sizwe Nxedlana, chief executive of FNB and RMB Private Banking and Wealth Management, says clients had asked for alternative investments and that crypto offers that diversity. Bheki Mkhize, chief executive of FNB Wealth and Asset Management, says the bank has seen a lot of activity and interest, and wants clients to understand what they are buying, how volatile it is, and to have tools to manage their trading.

FNB plans to add more crypto assets and educational content. The launch lands while South Africa's crypto industry is fighting draft cross-border crypto rules from Treasury and the Reserve Bank, which VALR and others have opposed.

TechCentral reported the launch and the decision to keep assets inside FNB's platform. Its earlier coverage of Discovery Bank sets out the more open Luno-linked model for comparison. TechCentral also reported this week Luno's argument that the draft cross-border rules may clash with South Africa's International Monetary Fund commitments.

For a beginner, the FNB design is reasonable. Buying bitcoin through a bank app you already use, from R10, with no wallet to manage and no risk of sending coins to the wrong address, removes most of the ways first-time buyers lose money outside of the price itself.

The trade-off is that you cannot do with the coins what crypto is designed for. You cannot move them to your own wallet, pay someone, or switch to another exchange with better prices, so in practice you hold a price exposure that lives inside FNB. That is closer to buying a share than owning cash. The closed design also looks built around regulation. Keeping everything inside a South African bank avoids most of the cross-border questions in the draft crypto rules, at a time when the FSCA has already put crypto under a strict licensing regime, unlike its wait-and-see approach to AI.

For local crypto exchanges, a bank with millions of clients selling crypto in-app is serious competition for first-time buyers, even when the bank uses one of them behind the scenes.

You might also like our piece on the FSCA debarments at Africa Bitcoin Corporation, Squirrel Away listing its own fund on the JSE, and what SA investment tax takes from gains and dividends.

Get more SA tech and business news and subscribe to The Open Letter.