UBS has been considering partners for this push into crypto for months but has not yet made a decision, Bloomberg reported Friday (Jan. 23), citing unnamed sources.
The crypto offering would begin with select clients of UBS’s private bank in Switzerland and could then be expanded to the United States and the Asia-Pacific region, according to the report.
Asked about the report by Bloomberg, a UBS spokesperson said, per the report: “As part of UBS’s digital asset strategy, we actively monitor developments and explore initiatives that reflect client needs, regulatory developments, market trends and robust risk controls. We recognize the importance of distributed ledger technology like blockchain, which underpins digital assets.”
UBS and digital payments firm Ant International said in November that they partnered to explore the use of blockchain-based tokenized deposits to support Ant’s global payments settlement and liquidity management. The arrangement involves Ant using UBS Digital Cash, a blockchain-based payment platform introduced in 2024.
During the same month, UBS said it completed a live tokenized fund transaction using Chainlink’s Digital Transfer Agent technical standard. The transaction saw the completion of an on-chain subscription and redemption request of the UBS USD Money Market Investment Fund Token, which is built on Ethereum distributed ledger technology.
UBS announced the creation of UBS Digital Cash in November 2024, saying this blockchain-based payment solution was designed to allow for the programmability of money movements for the bank’s corporate and institutional clients.
It was reported in December that JPMorganChase was weighing cryptocurrency trading for its institutional clients and determining what products and services its markets division could offer to widen its digital asset business.
In September, it was reported that E-Trade, the online stock trading arm of Morgan Stanley, was set to add cryptocurrency trading to its platform in 2026, enabling clients to trade Bitcoin, Ether and Solana. The report said Morgan Stanley began offering Bitcoin funds to wealth management clients about four years earlier and has embraced crypto amid the policy changes that followed the election of President Donald Trump.