Major American investment bank JPMorgan Chase & Co will give its wealth management clients access to a selection of cryptocurrency funds, becoming the largest and unlikeliest United States banking giant to open crypto trading to all clients.
JPMorgan’s financial advisors have been approved to execute trades with the shares of Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum, and Ethereum Classic funds of digital asset manager Grayscale Investments. Additionally, clients will also be able to access an over-the-counter Bitcoin fund run by Osprey Funds, OBTC. The policy change became effective on July 19, per a memo seen by Business Insider.
JPMorgan is notably the first major U.S. bank to offer indirect crypto investing to all clients seeking investment advice beyond just the rich ones. According to sources familiar with the matter, the bank’s investors using its commission-free Chase trading app, clients managed by financial advisors, and affluent clients will all be allowed seamless access to the crypto funds.
However, directly recommending crypto products to clients will not be allowed. This means that the bank’s financial advisors will only execute unsolicited trade requests from clients.
During an interview with Bloomberg a few days ago, JPMorgan’s Asset & Wealth Management CEO Mary Callahan Erdoes revealed that a majority of the bank’s clients see bitcoin as an asset class they want to invest in.
Earlier in April, ZyCrypto reported that JPMorgan was preparing to offer an actively managed bitcoin fund to private wealth clients in partnership with cryptocurrency custody firm NYDIG.
Enthusiasts are now waiting to see whether other Wall Street megabanks that presently offer limited cryptocurrency investing to select clients will follow in JPMorgan’s footsteps.
Back in March, Morgan Stanley became the first big bank to start offering wealthy clients with at least $2 million in assets access to bitcoin funds, and in June Goldman Sachs unveiled a bitcoin futures trading product for its institutional customers.
As you can recall, Jamie Dimon, the CEO of the New York-based investment bank called bitcoin a fraud back in 2017 and even threatened to fire employees who traded the asset. Although he still insists he’s not a bitcoin supporter despite the soaring demand among clients, his attitude towards the flagship crypto and the crypto space, in general, has evidently evolved.
Furthermore, JPMorgan now constantly speaks about digital currencies and offers banking services to leading cryptocurrency exchanges Coinbase and Gemini. All these moves suggest that the bank is becoming more open to the cryptocurrency industry.
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