Morgan Stanley launched its own bitcoin investment trust, the Morgan Stanley Bitcoin Trust (The price of MSBT), in a market believed to be still in its infancy.
In the third group run by Tyler EvansAmy Oldenburg, the bank’s head of digital assets, spent a good part of the hour making a case for bitcoin that few customers heard everything, and said that the difference is a problem for companies very quickly.
“We have to start with bitcoin,” Oldenburg told the audience, citing the stock’s roughly $1.5 trillion market cap and its distance from the rest of the crypto community.
He was careful to draw a line between bitcoin and crypto as a whole, a distinction he said many retail and institutional clients still lack confidence in. The company wants to see this difference based on relevant research, not just a story.
Oldenburg: Bitcoin has an education problem
He said, the problem of education is very big. Many marketers still associate bitcoin with its long history of being used by criminals, and struggle to balance that image when trying to distribute it.
Oldenburg said that when customers ask about yield or transparency, his team tries to be straightforward: “you can show it as yield, but the asset is bitcoin.” Clarity, he said, is still missing from many discussions in the market, and there is “a lot of work to do.”
The price of MSBT earned more than $100 million in its first week of sales, a strong initial signal for a product that the bank explains is designed to fit the full range of its customers and not a narrow segment.
But Oldenburg was quick to put the number in detail. All the initial investments came through self-made accounts, because the fund was not yet available on the advisory platform.
He said that the bank has announced 2-4% crypto distribution advice, and that even with that guidance, taking it through the counselors is too late. The product, he reminded the audience, has been on the market for less than a year.
To bridge this gap, Morgan Stanley is working from within. Oldenburg said the firm is developing internal training for financial advisors to talk to clients about bitcoin with confidence, and that his team spends “hour after hour” on the phone walking clients through illustrations and distribution sessions.
He said the bank creates products for customers with different needs and wants its platform to meet each of those needs, including customers who want direct ETP management, and that crypto trading is coming to those on the wealth management side.
For management, Oldenburg acknowledged the challenges of the decision. The market has no shortage of suppliers, and the choice between them was not straightforward, which made the company work with more than one. Morgan Stanley finally thrown Coinbase and BNY Mellon as managers of MSBT.
As the conversation turned to bitcoin’s top game, Oldenburg called Strategy, the Michael Saylor-led firm formerly known as MicroStrategy, “a close friend of Morgan Stanley,” and said the bank has been working closely with it through its evolution.
He added that most of the information displayed in the car will come from the store and that “digital credit” as a group will take time to develop.
Morgan Stanley buying bitcoin “is out of the question”
In response to the question of banks holding bitcoin on their balance sheets, Oldenburg said it is “not out of the question” whether the progress of the regulatory process will lead to an increase in the number of bitcoins. management
The US needs greater coordination between financial regulators, he said, and for a global firm like Morgan Stanley, the picture is more complicated – each authority comes with its own plan.
They closed where they started: on the need for research and outreach. The market has comments and personalities that investors trust and follow, he said, and the task ahead is to bring that kind of analysis, focused on the public.
He said: “We are still very early in the journey. “A little distribution.
