M1 Finance, a company offering banking and investment services is now opening up to cryptocurrency trading. This confirms the trend that traditional finance companies are increasingly including our ecosystem in their catalogue
M1 Finance is diversifying into crypto-currencies
US fintech M1 Finance, which offers banking and investment services, is expanding into cryptocurrency trading:
Introducing M1 Crypto. Learn more about our newest product and why we launched it from our founder and CEO, Brian Barnes: https://t.co/Be5Zy7WqAU pic.twitter.com/SY8x5Pn9JM
– M1 (@M1Finance) July 11, 2022
The Chicago-based neobank, founded in 2015, was already offering various investment products such as ETFs. With cryptocurrencies, M1 is responding to a growing demand from its customers:
The crypto market is still young and volatile, with Bitcoin having emerged only 13 years ago. Crypto-currencies are an approximately $1 trillion asset class in which over 20% of Americans have invested […]. It is the most requested asset addition, with about half of our surveyed users wanting to use M1 to invest in cryptos. “
For now, the platform will allow investment in 10 different assets and that obviously includes Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH). This new service is already available.
A service designed to facilitate the user experience
It seems that the assets offered by M1 are indeed spot cryptocurrencies and not derivatives. The platform indeed announces that the custody service will be performed by Apex Crypto. However, it is not specified whether or not it will be possible to make deposits or withdrawals from these digital assets.
This new product is designed to be easy to use. For example, it allows users to create their own index in the manner of an ETF. To do this, the user will determine a percentage allocation for each asset in the portfolio. This index can then be readjusted automatically according to market trends.
In the same logic, a user can choose to follow predefined strategies.
While this new service will not revolutionise anything in our ecosystem as such, it does demonstrate a growing interest in digital assets. And for good reason, more and more companies in the banking and finance sector are choosing to integrate cryptocurrencies into their offering.
