UBS May Be Eyeing Bitcoin and Ether Trading for Ultra‑Rich Clients
The world’s biggest global wealth manager, UBS, is reportedly exploring a move to open crypto trading to its wealthiest clients.
Bloomberg reported Friday, citing a person familiar with the matter, that the Swiss banking giant aims to let select private banking clients in Switzerland trade Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH) first, with a possible rollout to the Asia‑Pacific region and the United States later.
The person also reportedly said that UBS was currently selecting partners for its crypto offering, although the bank has not publicly confirmed the details.
UBS already runs tokenization pilots such as the uMINT tokenized US dollar money market fund on Ethereum and a Swift-UBS-Chainlink tokenized fund settlement trial, experimenting with putting traditional fund products on blockchain rails even before considering offering spot crypto trading.
UBS has also deepened its blockchain push on the payments side, teaming up with Ant International to trial tokenized deposits for real-time cross-border treasury flows using its UBS Digital Cash platform in Singapore.
The pilot aims to let Ant move liquidity across its Alipay+ ecosystem in minutes instead of days by putting bank deposit claims on permissioned ledgers, positioning tokenized bank money as a potential replacement for legacy, cutoff‑bound correspondent banking rails.
Related: Bank of America lets wealth advisers recommend Bitcoin ETFs
Wall Street’s last holdouts follow suit
The Swiss group would be following US banking giant JPMorgan, which is exploring crypto trading for institutional clients and already uses its JPM Coin system for onchain wholesale payments and collateral, and asset management behemoths BlackRock and Fidelity, which have become leading issuers of spot Bitcoin and Ether ETFs.
Vanguard, long one of Wall Street’s most vocal crypto skeptics, effectively became one of the last major holdouts to fold when it reversed its hardline stance in December 2025 and allowed clients to trade crypto ETFs on its platform.
UBS oversaw some $4.7 trillion in wealth assets as of September 2025. If it moves ahead with crypto trading, the bank will open a new, in‑house on‑ramp for ultra‑high net worth portfolios.
Cointelegraph reached out to UBS for comment on the reported private banking crypto trading plans, but had not received a response by publication.
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