Standard Chartered Opens Bitcoin and Ethereum Trading to Wealthy UAE Clients

Standard Chartered will now let its wealthier clients in the United Arab Emirates buy and sell Bitcoin and Ethereum straight from their bank accounts, the British lender announced Wednesday.

The move eliminates the need for its affluent clients to rely on separate wallets or third-party platforms, the bank said.

The service opens first to clients classified as Professional Investors and runs under licensing approval from Dubai's Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority, or VARA. The bank called it a global first for Standard Chartered and the first crypto trading offering from an international bank in the UAE.

Trades are executed inside the bank's own ecosystem, and Standard Chartered handles custody and settlement end-to-end through what it calls a closed-loop model, which the bank says reduces clients' exposure to third-party wallet risk.

The bank built the product across its Wealth and Retail Banking and Corporate and Investment Banking units, working with Zodia Markets, a digital asset trading firm backed by Standard Chartered's venture arm, SC Ventures.

“As client interest in digital assets continues to grow, this launch represents a significant milestone for Standard Chartered as we bring digital assets into our core wealth offering” Samir Subberwal, the bank's global head of wealth solutions, retail products, data and analytics, said. He argued that clients now want more than access, and are looking for the security that comes with buying through a regulated institution.

Rola Abu Manneh, Standard Chartered's CEO for the UAE, Middle East and Pakistan, said the country was a natural choice given its regulatory environment and its role as one of the bank's four global wealth hubs.

Until now, Standard Chartered's crypto trading business had catered to institutions. In July 2025, it became the first global systemically important bank—one of the lenders regulators consider too big to fail—to offer spot trading in Bitcoin and Ethereum to institutional clients, through its U.K. branch.

It brought that institutional desk to the UAE last month through its unit in the Dubai International Financial Centre, which is overseen by a different watchdog, the Dubai Financial Services Authority. The bank's crypto custody service had already gone live in the UAE in September 2024, and in the European Union through a Luxembourg entity a few months later.

Wealth clients previously had indirect routes into crypto at the bank: crypto exchange-traded funds on its cash equities platform, structured products, and over-the-counter derivatives tied to crypto prices. The new service lets them own the coins themselves, held by the bank, rather than a product that tracks their price.

The bank has historically been very bullish towards crypto, with frequent calls from its analysts for Bitcoin to extend to new highs.