On Jan. 23, 2026, UBS began exploring opening crypto trading to its wealthiest private banking clients, reported. It would let Swiss private clients trade Bitcoin and Ether first, with possible rollouts in Asia‑Pacific and the United States later.
Bank officials are choosing external partners for the service and have not publicly confirmed final details. The bank already runs tokenization pilots, including the uMINT tokenized US dollar money market fund on Ethereum and a Swift‑UBS‑Chainlink tokenized fund settlement trial.
On payments, UBS has partnered with Ant International to trial tokenized deposits and real‑time cross‑border treasury flows using its UBS Digital Cash platform in Singapore. The pilot aims to move liquidity across the Alipay+ ecosystem in minutes instead of days by putting bank deposit claims on permissioned ledgers.
This move would follow other large firms. JPMorgan is also exploring crypto trading for institutional clients (see reported), while BlackRock and Fidelity lead spot crypto ETF issuance and Vanguard recently relaxed its stance.
UBS oversaw some $4.7 trillion in wealth assets as of September 2025, which would provide an in‑house on‑ramp for ultra‑high‑net‑worth portfolios (Ed. note: $4.7 trillion highlights the scale of potential demand).
