For many French savers, their first taste of Bitcoin did not come from a crypto exchange. It arrived inside their everyday bank account. In March 2025, BoursoBank — the online bank owned by Société Générale — listed crypto exchange-traded notes from CoinShares and BlackRock, allowing its customers to gain exposure to Bitcoin and Ethereum prices through a familiar banking app, alongside ordinary shares and funds.
What an ETN actually is
An ETN is a debt note issued by a financial company that promises to track the price of an underlying asset — here, a cryptocurrency. Buy the note and your account rises and falls with Bitcoin’s price, without you ever holding a coin: no wallet, no recovery phrase, no exchange account. The trade-off is that you own a claim on the issuer, not the asset itself: if the issuer fails, noteholders stand in line as creditors, which is why the big names behind a product matter.
A curious split inside one banking group
The BoursoBank move also highlights how France’s biggest banking group approaches crypto in two different ways. Société Générale’s main retail app offers no direct crypto buying at all — customers who want actual coins make a bank transfer out to a MiCA-authorised exchange and buy there. Meanwhile the group’s online bank offers price exposure through listed notes, and its specialist subsidiary SG-FORGE issues its own euro stablecoin. Three doors, three different products, one group.
ETN route vs exchange route
- Ownership: an ETN gives price exposure only; an exchange purchase gives you coins you can withdraw and hold yourself.
- Custody: ETNs sit with the issuer and your bank’s systems; exchange coins depend on the platform unless you self-custody.
- Costs: ETNs carry product fees plus bank brokerage charges; exchanges charge trading and withdrawal fees instead.
- Flexibility: exchange coins trade around the clock and can move into DeFi or cold storage; ETNs trade in market hours and stay in the account.
Who each route suits
For a cautious saver who wants a small, simple Bitcoin allocation inside an account they already trust, an ETN is a genuinely convenient on-ramp. For anyone who values the core promise of crypto — holding the asset itself, transferable at any hour — only the exchange-and-wallet route delivers it. Neither is automatically better; they are different products wearing similar tickers, and confusing the two is the mistake to avoid.
