When Fidor Bank's Michael Maier spoke to CoinDesk in June, the Internet bank COO framed his industry as one that bitcoin would grow to challenge directly, suggesting at the time that its partnership with Kraken demonstrated its intent to accept this future and even cooperate with it.

However passive these statements may have seemed at the time, they came into sharper focus on 31st October, when Fidor announced it would team with its San Francisco-based bitcoin exchange partner to launch "the world's first cryptocurrency bank".

The unnamed project seeks to build a regulated financial institution that would help bitcoin startups that have struggled to secure and maintain accounts even for day-to-day business.

Given this backdrop, Kraken CEO Jesse Powell sees his company's most prominent collaboration with Fidor as more than an exercise in bringing another first to the ecosystem. In a new interview, Powell positioned the specialized bank for cryptocurrencies as a necessity should the ecosystem succeed at delivering on bitcoin's full technological potential.

source: http://www.coindesk.com/kraken-seeking-solve-bitcoins-banking-dilemma/