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# FNB customers can now buy bitcoin from R10, but they can never take the coins out
- URL: https://www.businessbagel.com/fnb-crypto-trading-valr-ringfenced/
- Published: 2026-10-08T03:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-08T03:00:00.000Z
- Description: FNB's share-trading accounts now sell five cryptocurrencies from R10, but the coins are ringfenced inside the bank: no withdrawals to your own wallet, and nothing brought in from elsewhere.
- Author: Christian Maidman
- Tags: Companies, Business Bagel News

Buying bitcoin has usually meant opening an account with a crypto exchange and moving money across to it. FNB customers can now skip that step, and the price of the shortcut is that whatever they buy stays inside the bank.

Since Tuesday, FNB's share-trading accounts can hold five crypto assets. Bitcoin and ether are the best known, and USDT is a stablecoin, a coin pegged to the US dollar. Purchases come out of money already sitting in your FNB account, the minimum is R10, and trading runs around the clock, seven days a week. The bank built it with VALR, a South African-founded crypto platform.

## Ringfenced, in FNB's own word

The condition fits in one word: ringfenced. You cannot withdraw your bitcoin to a wallet you control, send it to another exchange, or bring in coins you already hold elsewhere. Whatever you buy through FNB is held, and eventually sold, through FNB.

In practice that makes it an investment account with crypto prices in it, rather than a crypto wallet. A standard exchange account lets you send coins onchain to any address you choose, and as crypto.news describes it, FNB's product is built around buying, holding and selling through the bank's own infrastructure instead.

## Why a bank would build it this way

The appetite is there. BusinessDay counts more than 6 million South Africans holding a crypto asset, and Bheki Mkhize, who runs FNB Wealth and Asset Management, says the bank has seen a lot of activity and interest from its own clients, who want a trusted platform to do it on.

For the ringfence itself, FNB gives two reasons: the security of the platform, and what it calls a more conservative approach to compliance and exchange control laws. The second has a live backdrop. The Reserve Bank and National Treasury published a draft Crypto Assets Manual in August on how crypto may cross the border, public comment closed on 30 September, and no final version is out yet. Local platforms, VALR among them, have opposed the draft.

Discovery Bank took the opposite route. It announced last November that its customers could trade crypto in its app by linking an account at Luno, an outside exchange, and moving money between the two.

FNB has not published its fees, a target for customer numbers or a date for adding more coins. Mkhize says more investment options and learning material will follow. "This is just a start," he said.