Insider: Morgan Stanley is exploring allowing brokers to actively promote Bitcoin ETFs to clients

PANews reported on April 25th, according to Advisorhub, two executives familiar with Morgan Stanley's plans revealed that the company is exploring expanding Bitcoin sales, allowing its approximately 15,000 brokers to solicit customers for purchases. Like other peers, the company began offering related products after Bitcoin ETF received regulatory approval in January this year. However, it has always been offered in a non-active selling manner before this means that customers must actively seek their advisors for investment. Allowing advisors to recommend these products may increase demand but also expose the company to additional liability risks.

One of the executives said that Morgan Stanley is still trying to establish "protection rules" for promoted purchase activities including risk tolerance requirements and restrictions on investment allocation and transaction frequency. Neither executive provided a timeframe for when the company might change its policy. "We will be very careful," added the first executive, "we want to make sure everyone has a chance to touch it. We just want to do this in a controlled way."

Morgan Stanley's peers have also adopted similar cautious attitudes. Merrill Lynch of Bank of America and Wells Fargo launched related products shortly after Bitcoin ETF was approved but only accepted non-active purchases and were only available super-rich clients under certain circumstances. For example, Merrill Lynch requires customers to have at least $10 million or more assets before they can buy Bitcoin ETFs.