Julius Baer Group, a 132-year-old private banking services company based in Zurich, Switzerland, recently announced that it will offer crypto services to its high-net-worth clientele. The bank has already launched test programs for cryptocurrency counseling, trading, and investing.
The bank sees this as a new strategy coming at a ‘potentially defining moment’ in the digital asset industry. During an investor presentation, CEO Philipp Rickenbacher expressed his thoughts on the current state of crypto markets, saying, “It could well be at this very instant that we are witnessing a bubble-burst moment of the crypto-industry, and we all know what happened after the dot-com bubble burst 30 years ago. It paved the way for the emergence of a new sector that indeed transformed our lives.”
Rickenbacher went on to remark that the private bank needs to “establish a strong presence in this sector.” “That’s why now is the ideal time to invest in the long-term potential of digital asset technology,” he said.
Since 2019, the bank has been convinced of the value and future potential of crypto-assets and seeks to place itself at the junction of “digital assets and the fiat world.”
Baer Group’s shift in strategy contrasts sharply with rival UBS Group AG, another major Swiss bank, which is not advertising any digital asset advisory services. Baer Bank, on the other hand, has been preparing to enter the digital asset area for some time. Baer invested in SEBA Crypto AG, one of Switzerland’s two fully licensed cryptocurrency banks, in 2019.
Baer is equally enthusiastic about the future potential of decentralized finance. “On the other side, it’s also where traditional, cost-heavy, and sophisticated components of the old banking system are today simply rewritten with a few lines of code,” the banking executive stated. There is enormous potential to truly alter our value chains as technology and conventional banking eventually collide.”