Swiss Bank UBS Group Planning To Offer Crypto To Top Customers
Swiss-based bank and financial services provider UBS Group AG looks to be the next to enter the fold. Reports released to start the week state that the banking behemoth is considering several different alternatives to offer digital currency investments.
UBS Joins The Club
The news comes not long after major US-based firms, such as
Goldman Sachs and Citi, have been associated with similar moves. Goldman
recently opened up trading with non-deliverable forwards tied to Bitcoin, Citi
has been reported to be considering crypto services, and Morgan Stanley and
Bank of New York Mellon are getting involved as well. Goldman’s crypto desk
came back open being put on hold for roughly three years.
In a statement, UBS Group representatives said “we are
monitoring the developments in the field of digital assets closely. Importantly,
we are most interested in the technology which underpins digital assets, namely
the distributed ledger technology”. According to the Bloomberg report releasing
the news, UBS Group spends roughly $3.5B USD annually on technology maintaining
and modernizing existing infrastructure and innovating new tools for employees
and products for clients.
Also cited in the report was news that Swiss competitor
Julius Baer is discussing offering clients access to crypto access.
UBS is reported to be strongly taking in consideration the
volatility of cryptocurrencies, and accordingly will likely be allowing just a
small portion of clients total wealth for a crypto investment offering.
Additionally, the firm will only be allocating the investment to it’s wealthier
asset class. Options for these investors will likely include investing through
third-party investment vehicles.
The news comes just a few months after UBS Group suggested
concern in published guidance for clients. In the published report, the firm
stated that they “wouldn’t rule out further price increases” but that they were
also “skeptical of any essential real-world use cases”, driving difficulty for
the firm to “estimate a fair value for Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies”. The
report added that there is “little in [UBS] view to stop a cryptocurrency’s
price from going to zero when a better designed version is launched or if
regulatory changes stifle sentiment”.
UBS is Switzerland’s largest investment bank by total
assets, and offers a bevy of financial services. This move would be the first
of it’s kind for UBS, but other Swiss banks (outside of the aforementioned
Julius Baer) are also looking to get aggressive in the cryptocurrency space,
such as Swissquote, which partnered with digital assets provider Taurus last
month. Switzerland recently introduced legislation that opened the door for
blockchain finance into legal code.
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