The 29-year-old Scot who lives in Singapore reached out to a handful of local and international banks to ask about opening investment accounts to trade crypto with funds from his family’s wealth office. To his surprise, he was told that while bankers could offer their personal opinions on digital currencies, they couldn’t provide investment services.
“We had to eventually deploy the family office investment via Gemini, a U.S.-based digital asset exchange that operates in Singapore,” said Dart, who helps his parents run the firm that mainly invests in stocks, currencies and private equity. “It’s too much risk for banks to put Bitcoin in the portfolio, that’s generally the reason.”
Dart, whose family owns a semiconductor business, is just one of millions of wealthy investors going it alone as banks largely shy away from cryptocurrencies. Thousands of miles away, Christian Armbruester, founder of the London-based Blu Family Office, is exploring setting up a dedicated fund to trade the assets at a potential cost of more than $100,000 after European banks turned him away.
