Wells Fargo Advisors to sell new bitcoin ETFs
Wells Fargo Advisors, with close to 12,000 financial advisors across various business channels, said Friday that it was selling new spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds, but only when a customer asked for the security in a non-solicited trade or without any prompting from a salesperson.
“Spot bitcoin ETFs are available for unsolicited purchases through an advisor with Wells Fargo Advisors or through our online WellsTrade platform,” a company spokesperson wrote in an email Friday morning.
The broad retail brokerage industry, with 320,000 or so financial advisors selling and recommending products, is in the process of deciding whether or not to sell the new bitcoin ETFs, almost a dozen of which were given the green light Wednesday by the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Bloomberg News reported that a Vanguard Group Inc. spokesperson said its brokerage arm will not offer trading in ETFs that invest directly in bitcoin.
Bank of America Corp.’s Merrill Edge is still evaluating whether to provide that service, and UBS Group is offering a number of the bitcoin ETFs to some of its wealth management clients with brokerage accounts who approach it on an unsolicited basis, according to Bloomberg’s report.
Meanwhile, Wells Fargo Advisors said Friday in its fourth-quarter earnings presentation that it intends to deliver a number of additions and tweaks to its broker desktop and other similar services to its platform for financial advisors.
Those included: the rollout to all advisor platforms of Advisory Gateway, a new front end allowing advisors to better serve clients; a streamlined client and advisor experience to transact digitally for alternative investments; a unified managed account platform enabling advisors to model and
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