In a move that could help raise digital asset investing’s profile beyond a talking point at conferences and webinars, Morningstar’s ByAllAccounts aggregation tool for financial advisors last week integrated BITRIA, a digital asset management platform developed by San Francisco-based Blockchange.

BITRIA is Morningstar’s first direct data integration for digital assets into ByAllAccounts, which is used by more than 1,400 advisory firms and provides advisors with a complete picture of all client assets viewed through a single lens. Digital assets can now sit alongside a client’s traditional assets, thereby offering advisors an opportunity for improved analysis, planning and reporting.

“ByAllAccounts is value neutral on digital assets,” said Katy Gibson, Morningstar’s head of product for the platform. “Our goal is to empower investor success by providing timely, accurate account data as a source of truth for investors and their advisors, regardless of the asset type.”

Prompted by their clients asking about digital assets, advisors have in turn been asking for tools to give them more transparency around this new kind of investment, Gibson said. “Advisors are asking for timely and accurate data for all of their clients’ assets, including growing demand for digital assets,” she said. “[And] if clients hold digital assets, they need transparency into these holdings so their advisors can give holistic advice on the entirety of their financial portfolio.”

For Blockchange, the integration is just another validation of where this nascent corner of the industry is heading. Since its founding in 2017, the company’s objective has been to simplify the path to digital asset investing.

“When we first started, we had been mining crypto, like Kraken and Coinbase,” said Dan Eyre, co-founder and CEO of Blockchange. “That was already being done, so we looked at what part of the industry was being underserved. We looked for a missing tool set, and that was with fiduciaries. There was this whole feeling that cryptocurrencies were criminal internet money. No one would touch it.”

But times change, and Eyre said he has noticed in the last 12 months a warming of the waters as regulatory clarity seems to be on the horizon.

“What asset managers need to provide is visibility and bring this asset class into their management. And absolutely there’s a feeling that our relationship with Morningstar is adding to this asset class’s legitimacy,” he said. “There’s the convenience factor, but it’s more than that. For those that were skeptical, the lack of integration was something they could point to and say, ‘If it was legitimate, it would be here.’ That Morningstar is taking this very seriously is a sign of things to come. And advisors now have to ask themselves, ‘Now that the tools are in place, what is my responsibility?’”

The integration allows Blockchange’s separately managed account partners to better serve the needs of financial advisors and their clients, who will be able to access digital asset data within platforms they already use, such as Addepar, Black Diamond Reporting, Envestnet Tamarac, Orion Advisor Services, Morningstar Office, eMoney Advisors, or any of the 22 portfolio accounting platforms that integrate with Morningstar ByAllAccounts for performance reporting.

“This collaboration with Morningstar, which has the largest market share in terms of data aggregation, gives any advisor, any client, the ability to turn on that feed of digital assets,” Eyre said. “Everything advisors could do with all the other asset classes for their clients, they can now do with their digital assts.”