The Goldman Sachs Group Inc.
GS
will be the latest major U.S. bank to provide its private wealth management (PWM) clients with a plethora of investment offerings in bitcoin and digital assets. This decision was prompted by its clients’ demand for exposure to the same. The news was first reported by CNBC.
Goldman Sachs’s latest move follows its peer
Morgan Stanley
’s
MS
endeavor to start offering clients access to three bitcoin funds, as reported recently.
Goldman Sachs informed its employees, through an internal memo shared with CoinDesk, that Mary Rich has been promoted to global head of the Digital Assets Group for private wealth management at the company. Rich would help educate clients about the digital assets and blockchain technology, and work with advisors as well.
Rich communicated that apart from offering clients investing ways that are “more akin to the underlying asset class which trades 24-7 globally”, the bank will also likely provide investment funds similar to those provided by Morgan Stanley. Some crypto funds, such as Galaxy Bitcoin Fund, can only be purchased or disposed of once per quarter, whereas Galaxy’s institutional bitcoin fund can be liquidated weekly.
The New York-based investment bank’s PWM business primarily targets families, individuals and endowments with at least $25 million to invest, so the wealthier clients will be facilitated the access to the volatile digital investments.
Clients will be allowed to start investing in these investment offerings from the second quarter this year. According to people familiar with the matter, Goldman Sachs is in the process of procuring approvals from regulators, including the Securities and Exchange Commission and the New York Department of Financial Services.
Such an effort will likely boost the world’s most popular cryptocurrency asset prospects further, at least on grounds that Goldman Sachs is garnering cryptocurrency access to its clients.
The bitcoin rally has enticed big corporations, FinTech players and institutional clients to hold such digital assets. Investors have also been flocking to the flagship cryptocurrency on the back of acceptance from Elon Musk’s
Tesla, Inc.
TSLA
, which had disclosed about its $1.5-billion bitcoin purchase, driving the cryptocurrency to record highs, breaching $1 trillion in market capitalization for the first time ever.
Apart from this, the big banks have been preaching about the benefit of diversification in their clients’ portfolios via the cryptocurrency use. Earlier this February,
The Bank of New York Mellon Corporation
BK
became the first global custody bank to
announce plans to form a new unit
, Digital Assets, to help its institutional clients hold, transfer and issue digital assets. Pending product analysis and approvals, the company is expected to start offering these services later this year.
Shares of Goldman Sachs have rallied 63.6% over the past six months compared with the 63.9% gain of the
industry
it belongs to.
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Goldman Sachs currently carries a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy). You can see
the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here
.
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