Kathleen Murphy, personal investing president of American financial services company Fidelity Investments, has said that the firm does not offer cryptocurrencies on retail trading platforms to protect its clients.
Murphy voiced this sentiment during an interview with CNBC published on Oct. 11. After the interviewer asked when she expects users to trade cryptocurrency “in a meaningful way” on Fidelity’s platform, Murphy replied:
“You know, we’re really careful about that. So while we embrace crypto in terms of trying to understand it and be innovative and thoughtful… We’re also very careful about where we offer those types of things, so they’re not offered broadly on the retail platform. We want to be very careful about making sure that investors who really aren’t institutional investors [...] don't make a mistake with cryptocurrency.”
Fidelity has a total of $7.4 trillion in customer assets under its management and was expected to roll out Bitcoin (BTC) trading for institutional clients in May. More recently, Fidelity Center for Applied Technology was revealed to be an early customer of the Bitcoin mining services announced by blockchain technology company Blockstream in August.
As Cointelegraph reported on Oct. 9, Rayhaneh Sharif-Askary, director of sales and business development of cryptocurrency asset management giant Grayscale, has stated that institutional investors are constantly piling into the space in 2019.