Wells Fargo Advisors to sell new bitcoin ETFs

Wells Fargo Advisors, with close to 12,000 financial advisors across various business channels, said Friday that it was selling new spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds, but only when a customer asked for the security in a non-solicited trade or without any prompting from a salesperson.

"Spot bitcoin ETFs are available for unsolicited purchases through an advisor with Wells Fargo Advisors or through our online WellsTrade platform," a company spokesperson wrote in an email Friday morning.

The broad retail brokerage industry, with 320,000 or so financial advisors selling and recommending products, is in the process of deciding whether or not to sell the new bitcoin ETFs, almost a dozen of which were given the green light Wednesday by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Bloomberg News reported that a Vanguard Group Inc. spokesperson said its brokerage arm will not offer trading in ETFs that invest directly in bitcoin.

Bank of America Corp.’s Merrill Edge is still evaluating whether to provide that service, and UBS Group is offering a number of the bitcoin ETFs to some of its wealth management clients with brokerage accounts who approach it on an unsolicited basis, according to Bloomberg's report.

Meanwhile, Wells Fargo Advisors said Friday in its fourth-quarter earnings presentation that it intends to deliver a number of additions and tweaks to its broker desktop and other similar services to its platform for financial advisors.

Those included: the rollout to all advisor platforms of Advisory Gateway, a new front end allowing advisors to better serve clients; a streamlined client and advisor experience to transact digitally for alternative investments; a unified managed account platform enabling advisors to model and move assets across investment strategies; and a streamlined account opening and money movement experience to reduce paper and time for advisors and clients.

"Some of the tech changes have been positive," said one Wells Fargo financial advisor, who asked to speak anonymously.

Meanwhile, the bank's Wealth and Investment Management group, which includes Wells Fargo Advisors, reported total revenue of $3.66 billion for the quarter ending December 31, reflecting lower net interest income driven by lower deposit balances as customers continued to reallocate cash into higher-yielding alternatives. Net income for the quarter at the wealth group was $491 million, a decline of 31% when compared to the same quarter last year.

Since 2019, Wells Fargo & Co., the giant bank, has been overhauling its wealth management business, jettisoning noncore operations like its overseas client operations and rebranding its private bank, and focusing on overhauling management and better retaining its private client wealth management advisors.

Many of those advisors have been eying its independent arm, Wells Fargo Advisors Financial Network, or FiNet, where they work with greater autonomy and receive a more generous percentage of the revenue, but also shoulder more of the expenses as independent contractors.

"We’ve made significant investments the last few years across our franchise to better serve our customers and help drive growth," Mike Santomassimo, the bank's chef financial officer, said on a conference call Friday morning with investors. "We expect the revenue growth that these investments should generate in businesses like corporate investment banking and wealth and investment management will help fund additional investments."