Kraken, one of the largest crypto exchanges in the U.S., is offering a white-labelled version of its trading platform to financial service companies, the company announced Wednesday.
The new service, called Embed, seeks to make it easier for traditional banks, fintechs, and other financial service companies to allow their customers to trade crypto from within their own websites. In turn, it will give Kraken access to more users. “We want to enable basically every fintech, neobank, any kind of financial institution out there, to give access to their clients to be able to buy and sell crypto,” Brett McLain, head of payments and blockchain at Kraken, told Fortune.
Bunq, a digital bank based in Amsterdam, is the first company to adopt Kraken’s new service. On Tuesday, the company announced the launch of Bunq Crypto, which allows its European users to buy and sell crypto.
In order to offer crypto trading, a company usually has to develop significant infrastructure, which often requires large amounts of labor and capital. They also need regulatory licenses.
Instead, Kraken will let companies plug into its licensed crypto exchange through custom-built APIs, or application programming interfaces. Mainstays of software engineering, APIs allow developers to use other programmers’ or company’s code without needing to write it themselves. The user experience will resemble whatever brand or company that is using Embed, McLain says.
Kraken will charge a fee for the Embed service but the price will vary from customer to customer, McLain said. Kraken will also collect a portion of revenue generated from trading fees.
Embed is not the only service of its kind. In 2021, BitPanda, a Vienna-based crypto exchange, launched a service called Bitpanda Technology Solutions, which allows financial service companies to plug into its licensed crypto services and offer them to customers.
But McLain says Kraken’s broad array of digital assets and fast coin listing process sets it apart.
“If you’re one of these neobanks or fintech companies and you want to offer crypto to your clients, you want to have a really broad asset selection and you also want assets in a timely manner.” McLain said.
Kraken, founded in 2011 by Jesse Powell, is the world’s fourteenth-largest crypto exchange, according to crypto data platform CoinMarketCap. Following in the footsteps of its U.S. competitor Coinbase, Kraken is reportedly planning to go public in 2026.
