BCG tells banks to scale crypto now – Europe’s banks are already ahead of the curve

Boston Consulting Group and Anchorage Digital are urging banks to move digital assets “from experimentation to scale,” in a new report aimed squarely at the U.S. market. But for European lenders, the real test comes sooner: a hard Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) cut-off on July 1, and a euro-stablecoin race already underway. 

According to the June 10 report, co-authored by BCG managing directors in Zurich and Amsterdam, the next two years will be a “structurally unique window” for incumbents to define their position in four arenas: crypto brokerage and lending, tokenized money, tokenized funds, and tokenized real-world assets. Banks must pick a posture in each – lead, partner, distribute or monitor. 

The report’s reference points are American: the GENIUS Act – signed into law in 2025 –, permissive U.S. regulatory rulings, and tokenization moves by the NYSE and DTCC. 

European institutions, however, should also note who holds the pen: Anchorage is a digital-asset infrastructure provider and its advice, that most banks should partner for custody and wallets rather than build, favours its own business. The analysis holds up, however; the “how” needs reading through Europe’s own reality. 

Europe’s different starting line

The U.S. spent 2025 writing its first stablecoin law, but Europe has run a comprehensive rulebook, Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA), since 2024 – alongside a DLT Pilot Regime for tokenised markets. Where the BCG report treats regulatory clarity as a recent unlock for the U.S., in the EU it’s baseline.

That baseline is about to bite, however. MiCA’s grandfathering window for crypto firms closes on July 1, 2026, and of more than 3,000 virtual-asset providers active in 2024, only around 194 had a MiCA licence by May 2026, according to the law firm Hogan Lovells; roughly three-quarters of the old field could lose the right to operate. 

And the deadline’s teeth are already showing. Binance, the world largest cryptocurrency exchange, will reportedly have its Greek MiCA license application rejected before then. 

Read more: Binance EU access in doubt as Greece MiCA license faces rejection

For banks, the deadline is less a compliance chore than a clearing of the field: the unregulated rivals that captured European crypto demand are being culled just as licensed institutions gain a cleaner runway. 

The currency differs, too. MiCA caps any non-euro stablecoin used for payments at one million transactions, or €200 million, a day. USDT has been delisted from major EU venues; compliant coins such as USDC and EURC continue.

The opening, then, is in euro-dominated tokenised money – and Europe’s banks are taking it. Over 35 major lending firms, including ING, UniCredit, CaixaBank, BBVA, and BNP Paribas, have formed Qivalis, an Amsterdam venture supervised by the Dutch central bank that targets a MiCA-compliant euro stablecoin in late 2026. 

Meanwhile, Société Générale’s SG-FORGE has already issued its euro coin, EURCV.

What European banks should do now 

The report’s six call-to-action steps translate cleanly, albeit with some local inflection: 

1. Set an explicit posture per arena, matched to the franchise. A transaction bank may co-issue a euro stablecoin and build tokenised deposits; a regional bank wins through consortium membership and corporate treasury use cases; a wealth bank through access and distribution. Scattered pilots are the failure mode.
2. Treat the “money layer” as one agenda. Stablecoins, tokenised deposits, and ECB-settlement readiness need to move together, not as separate experiments – Qivalis and SG-FORGE show what happens when banks coordinate; isolated pilots elsewhere show what happens when they don’t. 
3. Pick two or three near-term plays with named owners and revenue targets: Euro-payment corridors, corporate treasury, money-market-fund distribution. The MiCA deadline gives these plays a harder timeline than most strategy documents allow for. 
4. Build as an orchestrator, integrating proven vendors into existing channels and controls. The bank’s edge is trust, balance sheet, and distribution – not necessarily in-house infrastructure. 
5. Upgrade risk and compliance before scaling, extending frameworks to on-chain monitoring and the new failure modes the report flags, from settlement finality to smart-contract risk; banks can outsource tooling, but not accountability. 
6. Engage the regulators now. The Commission’s MiCA review runs to August 31; the ECB’s Appia consultation is open. The rules on tokenised deposits and stablecoins are being rewritten this summer, and the institutions that only read the playbook will be governed by those who also helped write it.

For corporates, the lesson is concrete. The report cites Siemens cutting liquidity needs by 50% and saving over $20 million USD (€17.5 million) a year on tokenised-deposit rails. European treasurers should be testing euro-stablecoins and tokenised deposits now, and pressing their banks on which rails they’ll support.

The playbook’s core insight survives translation: this is a sequence of decisions, and first movers gain share. What changes in Europe is the clock – MiCA’s deadline – and the currency.

And while the region’s foundations are further along than the American-accented report lets on, the risk isn’t that Europe lacks a map. It’s that its banks could be reading it too slowly.

Featured image: via Taiwan Academy of Banking and Finance