On July 28, Santander Brazil CEO Mario Leao reported that Spanish banking multinational giant Banco Santander’s unit, Santander Brazil (SAN) plans to offer crypto trading to its institutional and individual clients in Brazil in the coming months. 

“We expect in the next few months to have definitions about it, who knows in the next release [of quarterly results], or even before,” CEO Mario Leao told Folha de S. Paulo. 

According to Folha de S. Paulo newspaper, SAN is planning to launch crypto-related services and could give further news about the initiative in the bank’s next earnings release, in mid-October. 

“We recognize that it is a market that is here to stay, and it is not necessarily a reaction to competitors positioning themselves. It is simply a vision that our client has demand for this type of asset, so we have to find the most correct and most educational way to do it,” Leao said. 

Santander has already made advances with crypto in Latin America this year. In March, partnered with, an Argentina-based agricultural commodities tokenization platform, Agrotoken, it launched loans in Argentina for farmers collateralized with tokenized commodities. 

Several non-crypto financial companies have declared or begun working on crypto ventures in Brazil as of late. The Brazilian fintech PicPay revealed its plans to launch a crypto exchange and a Brazilian real-tied stablecoin in July 2022. In December, Mercado Libre, Latin America’s largest e-commerce company by market value, began permitting customers in Brazil to purchase, sell and hold cryptocurrencies. 

On July 26, the largest Brazilian digital bank by market value, Nubank announced it has reached one million users on its crypto trading platform only within one month after launching in June.