Digital assets are already in your clients' portfolios

Each dot in the cloud is one wealth management professional who answered our survey. They sit across Italy, France, Germany, Switzerland and the United Kingdom: five markets with different regulatory regimes, distribution structures, and relationships with digital assets.

Every respondent is a verified member of the Citywire Engage professional panel, confirmed practitioners with direct or indirect responsibility for client investment decisions.

Over the next chapters, the same 261 dots will rearrange themselves to surface what the data actually says.

The sample is not uniform across countries. Italy is the largest cohort (30%), reflecting the scale of the financial adviser network model there. The UK follows (22%).

This is intentional as the goal was not to balance markets against each other but to capture a sample large enough to be meaningful within each market.

130+ firms are represented across those five countries, from global private banks to domestic savings institutions to independent adviser networks.

We asked each respondent to describe their current position when advising clients on digital assets. The five options ranged from actively recommending to generally discouraging.

76% of advisers engage with clients on digital assets in some form: they either actively discuss the topic or address it when clients raise it - they are not blocking the conversation. And an additional 13% actively recommend digital assets to clients.

The gap between "engaged" and "recommending” is not evenly distributed across markets. In one market, active recommendation reaches 21%. In another, it sits at 3%.

We also asked respondents to describe their firm's policy on digital assets. Four options: explicitly restricted, no clear guidance, permitted with limited guidance, clear policy and active support. When you lay adviser posture against firm policy, a pattern emerges that is too consistent to be coincidence.

In firms with clear, active support, 48% of advisers actively recommend digital assets. In explicitly restricted firms, that figure falls to 1%. Advisers in unblocked firms are 4.5 times more likely to recommend than those in blocked ones. The gap between engaged and recommending advisers is not about individual conviction or client relationships: this is about what the firm allows.

This finding runs through every market, every firm type, every adviser profile in the dataset.

We asked advisers how client interest in digital assets had changed over the past 12 months. 38% report increased client interest, and in Italy, that figure reaches 47%.

Of the advisers seeing rising interest, only 21% are actively recommending digital assets. The remaining 79% are listening but not acting on it. So where does that demand go?

We asked advisers to estimate what share of their clients' digital asset exposure sits outside their management. The answers vary sharply by country.

In Italy, where the financial adviser model maintains close client contact, the gap is the smallest in the survey. Demand converts into managed exposure before it becomes self-directed activity.

In the United Kingdom, the gap is the largest. UK clients are the most willing to act on digital assets. Yet UK advisers have the lowest active recommendation rate in the survey. Clients are investing and advisers cannot see it.

The gap between what clients hold and what advisers manage is already present and growing.

The full report covers what would actually change that: the two structural conditions that 74% of advisers name as their unlock, and how issuer selection criteria differ across the five markets.