Vontobel

Two open-end tracker certificates follow the price of bitcoin in US dollars on SIX Swiss Exchange. CH0553380269 (symbol ZXBABV) has traded since 3 February 2021 with a ratio of 1:100, so a small amount buys a share of one bitcoin, and CH0595154060 (symbol ZXBADV) has traded since 5 March 2021. Both carry a management fee of 3.75 percent a year, which Vontobel set to cover the capital it must hold against cryptocurrencies.

The 2021 series replaced the first bitcoin trackers from 2016, which Vontobel terminated and repaid on 19 March 2021 because stricter capital rules had made them uneconomic. Under the terms of the new series the investor does not carry the risk of a cyberattack on the issuer or a theft of the bitcoins behind the product.

The Crypto Portfolio certificate holds several cryptocurrencies in one product and has traded since 17 January 2020, in US dollars on SIX Swiss Exchange under CH0516776660 and in euros in Germany under DE000VE5CRY7. On 16 October 2026 ether made up 55.42 percent of the basket and bitcoin 33.25 percent, two smaller coins held 6.86 percent together and cash held 4.48 percent.

The certificate is open-end, and on 16 October 2026 Vontobel Markets reported a return of 392.52 percent since issue for the Swiss line. Over the same period the annual volatility was 68.07 percent and the largest drop from a peak was minus 76.54 percent.

On 17 November 2017 Vontobel brought short mini futures on bitcoin to the Swiss exchange, so investors could bet on a falling bitcoin price with a product kept in a securities account. On 17 May 2019 it listed its first open-end certificate on ether in US dollars, after earlier certificates on bitcoin and bitcoin cash in Switzerland and Germany.

All of these products are debt of the issuer, so the investor carries the credit risk of Vontobel. In exchange the investor holds no coins and needs no wallet of their own, as with any other exchange-traded crypto product.

In January 2019 Vontobel opened the Digital Asset Vault to banks, asset managers and wealth managers in Switzerland. Their clients give orders to buy, hold and move digital assets to their own bank, Vontobel keeps the assets inside its banking infrastructure with hardware security modules, and the client statement lists them next to traditional holdings.

The platform comes from Taurus in Geneva, and Vontobel was the first bank to run it. At launch Vontobel already provided custody and execution services to more than 100 banks and wealth managers, with 12 million securities transactions a year, and connected intermediaries need no crypto custody setup of their own.

On 1 October 2019 Vontobel issued a tracker certificate on the Vontobel Swiss Research Basket as an asset token on the Ethereum blockchain, where a smart contract maps the terms of the product. Lienhardt & Partner Privatbank Zürich was the first partner to trade the token, and neither side had to change its systems to do so.

In November 2019 Vontobel, Falcon Private Bank and Zürcher Kantonalbank settled trades of tokenized shares against tokenized Swiss francs in a test led by Deutsche Börse and Swisscom. Eurex Clearing issued the cash token, the share register of a Swiss company was digitized on the daura platform, and the cash and share sides ran on Corda and Hyperledger Fabric.

Vontobel Holding AG has its head office at Gotthardstrasse 43, 8022 Zurich, and the group is listed on the stock exchange and majority family-owned. Christel Rendu de Lint and Georg Schubiger lead the group together as co-CEOs.

In the first half of 2026 Vontobel earned a profit of CHF 216 million on revenues of CHF 852 million, and clients brought CHF 2.5 billion of net new money. Private clients use the app Vontobel Wealth for e-banking and the app Volt for digital portfolio management, which is open to clients domiciled in Switzerland.