Morgan Stanley It is up to months to offer crypto trading to retail customers through its electronic trade division while the Wall Street giant embraces what it called a transformer moment for the wealth management industry.
The firm works with the Zerohash startup – in which Morgan Stanley has also taken an investment stake – for liquidity, custody and the regulations around Crypto trading, according to a memo obtained by CNBC.
“We are on track to prepare to offer an exchange of crypto via a partner model to electronic commerce customers in the first half of 2026,” said Jed Finn, head of wealth management in Morgan Stanley, in memo.
Morgan Stanley is among the most aggressive large banks to adopt the crypto after the American government’s position on technology was launched with the election of President Donald Trump. Heritage management represented almost half of the total turnover of Morgan Stanley last year, which makes it more dependent on industry than its other large bank peers.
This decision is the last sign of the crypto by financial holders. In an anterior wave about four years ago, banks including Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs began to offer Bitcoin funds to their rich customers. This gave customers an exhibition to the asset class, through cryptographic companies, including Galaxy Digital which managed the funds.
But what Morgan Stanley does now is preparing to offer a direct Crypto property, which reduces certain third -party management fees and has greater risks. Morgan Stanley will first offer Bitcoin, Ether and Solana Trading, according to Bloomberg News.
Morgan Stanley is preparing for a future in which wealthy customers expect to see traditional and digital assets managed in the same environment, Finn said in memo.
The bank is working on a portfolio that will allow it to be the guardian of the digital assets of customers, a key element of its overall strategy, he said.
“Offering customers the possibility of exchanging the crypto is the tip of the iceberg,” said Finn.
Tokenized assets
The bank plans to help customers not only hold the crypto, but also the tokenized versions of traditional financial assets, according to the memo.
Tokenization – or the creation of a digital representation of assets, in particular cash, shares, bonds and real estate on a blockchain – “will considerably disturb” the wealth management industry, said Finn.
“The tokenized substitutes for species are starting to pay interest as soon as it strikes the portfolio,” said Finn. “The rest of the asset classes will follow suit to seek this efficiency.”
“We see immense power in the space of cryptocurrency, not only with crypto as an investment for our customers, but also around the DLT and tokenization more widely,” he said, using the acronym for the technology of the great distributed book, the concept that underlies the blockchain.