CoinShares reveals hidden crypto blind spot among UK financial advisers

A CoinShares survey has found that 52% of UK financial advisers cannot see most of their clients’ cryptocurrency holdings because of firm-level restrictions.

Summary

• CoinShares found that 52% of UK financial advisers cannot see most of their clients’ crypto holdings.
• The survey says firm policies, not investor demand, are the main barrier to crypto oversight.
• Ripple executives and regulators point to growing crypto payment use and tighter oversight of digital assets.

According to a survey released by digital asset investment firm CoinShares on Thursday, more than half of UK financial advisers say most of their clients’ cryptocurrency holdings sit outside their view, even as digital assets become more common in investment portfolios.

The survey covered 261 wealth management professionals across Europe and found that 52% of advisers in the UK said the majority of their clients’ crypto exposure was effectively “invisible” to them.

Across the wider group of countries surveyed, including France, Germany, Italy, and Switzerland, the figure fell to 25%. CoinShares also found that 61% of respondents worked at firms that either restricted digital assets or had no clear internal policy on handling them.

Firm policies are limiting adviser visibility

Commenting on the findings, CoinShares co-founder and CEO Jean-Marie Mognetti argued that internal company rules, rather than investor demand or adviser knowledge, are preventing wealth managers from understanding their clients’ complete financial positions.

According to Mognetti, clients have already committed capital to digital assets, but advisers often cannot factor those holdings into portfolio management because firm policies stop them from discussing or overseeing them. He said this creates what he described as a “wrong-way risk,” where advisers are expected to manage wealth without access to a complete picture of client assets.

Mognetti also argued that advisers cannot properly allocate investments, manage risk, or build trust unless they first have visibility into those digital asset holdings.

“The capital has already been allocated. The people entrusted with managing it simply cannot see it, and in most cases not because clients are unwilling to engage, but because firm policy prevents them from doing so. This is not a knowledge problem. It is not a demand problem. It is a firm-policy problem becoming a wrong-way risk.”

The findings arrive as crypto ownership continues to grow in the UK. According to the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority, around 8% of adults in the country owned cryptocurrency as of its December report.

More recently, the regulator proposed allowing authorized investment funds to allocate up to 10% of their assets to cryptocurrency exchange-traded notes, signalling continued regulatory engagement with the sector.

Payment infrastructure is expanding alongside regulation

The survey comes as industry executives continue to argue that crypto’s next stage of adoption will be driven by payments rather than speculation.

As previously reported by crypto.news, Ripple executive Reece Merrick compared today’s crypto payments market with the early years of e-commerce, when online shopping represented only a small share of retail activity despite the underlying technology already being developed. 

Merrick said improvements such as secure payment gateways, wider internet access, and smartphones eventually made e-commerce part of everyday life, and he believes scalable blockchains, stablecoins, regulated fiat on-ramps, and user-friendly wallets now play a similar role in crypto payments.

Separately, crypto.news previously reported that Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse said stablecoins are increasingly attracting interest from corporate finance teams and treasury departments evaluating blockchain-based payment systems and treasury management.

Regulators are also paying closer attention to how crypto transactions move through financial markets. In India, the Financial Intelligence Unit has asked at least three major cryptocurrency exchanges to provide records of over-the-counter crypto transactions exceeding $10,000, with the request covering data that exchanges must preserve from January 2026 onward.

The directive focuses on private OTC trades, which allow large transactions to avoid public order books but can make beneficial ownership harder to verify when intermediaries or closely held entities stand between exchanges and the original source of funds.