EF Hutton Inc., a once-popular financial services company that lost credibility after a cheque-kiting scandal in the mid-80s, is planning to relaunch its brand using cryptocurrency as a hook to attract younger audiences.
Once popular for its widely played TV ads, which crossed over the business – pop culture boundary over the course of the 1970s and 1980s, the stock brokerage lost most of its brand power after a systematic bogus-deposit scandal was unearthed by regulators in 1985.
Following a loss of investment and talent, the firm bounced around a series of mergers and acquisitions from 1988 through the 1990s, with its original divisions ending up under Citigroup and Morgan Stanley Wealth Management.
Despite having had practically no presence as a brand for over 30 years, HUTN Inc., the parent company of EF Hutton believes the time is right for the brand to once again achieve prominence by targeting millennial customers through a cryptocurrency offering.
Targeting Millennials via Crypto
According to Bloomberg, EF Hutton hopes to raise as much as $60 million by issuing cryptocurrencies. It revealed this in a press statement sent to the media on September 13, but it has thus far not revealed exactly what the tokens’ use cases will be or what blockchain framework they will operate on.
Three decades after the iconic “When EF Hutton talks, people listen” tagline ceased to be a fixture on American television, the company’s latest iteration believes the popularity of crypto assets among millennial audiences makes crypto an ideal market entry point.
The company has promised to release technical whitepapers setting out the use cases sometime this autumn, but no definite date has been fixed. EF Hutton claimed in a press release it has “special insight and experience in the cryptocurrency market”, but yet no indication exists as to precisely what the strategy is for a cryptocurrency launch.
CryptoGlobe reported recently that EF Hutton released the first in a planned series of subscription-only crypto market research reports covering Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP, EOS, Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash and Cardano. The company has also announced that it plans to set up a cryptocurrency exchange.
