Milan-listed bank also signed a call option for further increasing its stake in the firm whose shareholders are BayernLB, Helaba, RBI and others
Milan-listed UniCredit acquired a minority of German fintech VC Trade, a Frankfurt’s marketplace and provider of digital infrastructures for the debt capital market born in 2016 whose transactions volume amounted to over 90 billion euros in July 2026. More than 1600 banks and institutional investors closed 600 deals on VC Trade which aims to consolidate its international expansion and integrate further its technology in the Pan European digital financing ecosystem of UniCredit (press release).
In March 2022, VC Trade launched a capital increase that BayernLB, Helaba and Raiffeisen Bank International (RBI) subscribed (press release). German press reports said that each investor purchased 10% of the target on the ground of an enterprise value of 50 million euros while the founders Stefan Fromme (head of strategy, product design and sales), Tobias Zöller (Head of Functional and Technological Development and Operational Activities) and Sebastian Glock (chief legal officer) kept a 61%. Fromme is an investment banking veteran and former head of derivatives clearing of LBBW.
VC Trade developed an end-to-end digital infrastructure for private debt, enabling borrowers, arrangers, agents, lenders, institutional investors and advisers to interact. The platform covers the process from initial structuring and syndication through to the management of the entire loan lifecycle and maturity while automating operational and analytical processes and structuring of financial data. DealSync, is UniCredit’s AI-based proprietary platform for international middle market M&A that will expand the bank’s tools and capability to originate, distribute and manage debt on the European market.
The business originally centred on the Schuldscheindarlehen market – German-law bond loans placed privately with banks and institutional investors – a segment in which UniCredit now describes VC Trade as Germany’s leading marketplace in terms of both volume and the number of transactions facilitated. The platform expanded to include syndicated loans, the primary and secondary loan markets, and other private debt instruments.
UniCredit already acted as arranger for transactions completed on VC Trade, including a 500 million maxi-Schuldschein maturing in 2026 that the Municipality of Cologne issued and for which Helaba and ING Deutschland held the co-arrangers role.
In 2022, BayernLB, Helaba and RBI acquired a stake in VC Trade, the firm reported having over 850 clients. By July 2026, more than 1600 active banks and institutional investors processed on VC Trade platform over 600 transactions worth more than 90 billion euros. BayernLB announced its intention to manage an existing portfolio of over 19 billion euros with the firm’s technology after having already placed around 21 billion euros worth of new transactions through the platform.
Fromme said: “UniCredit’s investment marks an important milestone for VC Trade. We share a common vision for the future of the bond markets, based on end-to-end digitalisation, connectivity and artificial intelligence to support all partners involved in transactions. By combining our technology platform with UniCredit’s scale, market expertise and international presence, we can accelerate adoption across Europe and deliver added value to arrangers, agents, issuers and creditors.”
Sam Kendall, UniCredit’s head of Advisory & Financing Solutions, added: “The challenge that European financial markets are facing is not a lack of capital, but the cost of matching resources with SMEs and projects capable of generating profits. Reducing this service cost is at the heart of our UniCredit Unlimited strategy. VC Trade developed impressive technology that directly addresses this issue while reducing inefficiencies in the bond market and helping participants connect more effectively. I am delighted to work with them for building the financial market architecture for Europe’s future.”
In April 2026, UniCredit invested 4 million euros for purchasing a 16% of Milan’s BlockInvest for a strategic expansion in the field of financial instrument tokenisation (see here a previous post by BeBeez). The partnership with BlockInvest had already resulted, in December 2025, in the first Italian minibond tokenised on a public blockchain: a 5 million euro security issued by E4 Computer Engineering, structured by UniCredit and subscribed to in equal parts by the bank itself and by Cassa Depositi e Prestiti, with a 50 per cent guarantee from SACE. The security had been registered on the digital ledger managed by Weltix on the Polygon PoS blockchain, using BlockInvest’s technological infrastructure (see here a previous post by BeBeez). A few days later, UniCredit took another step by issuing the first tokenised structured note on a public blockchain reserved for private investors in Italy, again using Weltix and BlockInvest’s technology (see here a previous post by BeBeez). In 2019, UniCredit, a bank that ceo Andrea Orcel heads, acquired 10% of FinDynamic, a dynamic discounting fintech in which it later increased its holding to 11.45% (see here a previous post by BeBeez).
