The banking giants are giving wealth management clients access to the spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds that received U.S. regulatory approval and started trading in January. 

Bank of America’s Merrill and Wells Fargo are now offering access to spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETF) to wealth management clients with brokerage accounts who request the products, according to a Bloomberg report, citing sources familiar with the situation. 

The news comes after the spot bitcoin ETFs experienced a record week of volume and inflows. BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin ETF (IBIT) alone had record inflows of $612 million on Wednesday and crossed $9 billion in assets, according to data from Bloomberg ETF analyst James Seyffart. Strong demand for the ETFs has helped to steadily push the price of BTC higher, with bitcoin crossing the $60,000 mark on Wednesday for the first time since November 2021. 

On Thursday at press time, bitcoin was trading at $61,579, up 1.4% over the last hour, according to CoinGecko.

Read more: Should You Sell Bitcoin Now That It’s Nearing Its All-Time High?

The spot bitcoin ETFs, which offer direct exposure to the price of the world’s largest digital asset by market volume, began trading in January after receiving approval from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The ETFs are offered by some of the world’s largest asset managers, including BlackRock, Fidelity and Invesco, and large brokerages and trading platforms such as Charles Schwab and Robinhood began offering the spot bitcoin ETFs to their customers shortly after the funds were approved.

Meanwhile, UBS Group is offering some of the ETFs to a group of its wealth management clients on an unsolicited basis, according to Bloomberg, while CoinDesk reported this week that Morgan Stanley is considering offering them on its platform.  

But other asset managers and trading platforms have been more reluctant to offer the products to clients. 

Vanguard, which has $7.7 trillion in assets under management, said in January that the firm won’t provide access to the ETFs because they don’t “align” with the firm’s focus on balanced portfolios with long-term investments such as equities, bonds, and cash. Around the same time, a source told Fox Business that Merrill also wouldn’t offer access to its clients. 

It’s possible, however, that Merrill and Wells Fargo always intended to offer access to clients if there was interest. 

“I view [the ETFs] as more of a medium-term story because there’s a due diligence process that financial advisors and RIAs are doing,” Steven Lubka, head of private clients and family offices at Bitcoin financial services firm Swan Bitcoin, told Unchained in January. “It’s not just that on day one everyone can put everything in. They’re working on those products and having meetings with clients to talk to them about whether or not they might include a Bitcoin ETF in their portfolio.”