The world’s largest global wealth manager, UBS, is reportedly considering opening up cryptocurrency trading to its wealthiest clients.
Bloomberg reported Friday, citing a person familiar with the matter that the Swiss banking giant intends to first enable select private banking clients in Switzerland to trade Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH), with a possible later rollout to the Asia-Pacific region and the United States.
The person also reportedly said that UBS is currently selecting partners for its cryptocurrency offering, although the bank has not publicly confirmed details.
UBS is already running tokenization pilots such as the uMINT U.S. dollar tokenized money market fund on Ethereum and the Swift-UBS-Chainlink tokenized fund settlement trial, experimenting with putting conventional fund products on blockchain rails before even considering offering cryptocurrency spot trading.
UBS has also deepened its apply of blockchain technology on the payments side, partnering with Ant International to test tokenized deposits for real-time cross-border treasury flows using the UBS Digital Cash platform in Singapore.
The goal of the pilot is to enable Ant to move liquidity across the entire Alipay+ ecosystem in minutes instead of days by placing bank deposit claims on authorized ledgers, positioning tokenized bank money as a potential replacement for legacy, inaccessible correspondent banking rails.
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The Swiss group would follow in the footsteps of US banking giant JPMorgan discovering cryptocurrency trading for institutional clients and already uses the JPM Coin system for wholesale payments and onchain security, as well as asset management giants 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 challengers to back down when it reversed its hardline stance in December 2025 and allowed customers to trade cryptocurrency ETFs on its platform.
UBS oversaw some $4.7 trillion in property assets from September 2025. If it continues to trade cryptocurrencies, the bank will open a recent internal platform for ultra-high net worth portfolios.
Cointelegraph reached out to UBS for comment on its reported private banking cryptocurrency trading plans, but did not receive a response via publication.
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