Tokenisation: The shift that could reshape financial markets architecture

Key takeaways from the interview

• Scaling phase underway. Tokenisation is roughly halfway through a 20-year transformation, moving from experimentation towards reshaping the architecture of financial markets.
• BNP Paribas and market infrastructure players are proving real use cases. From the EDF ENR bond to DTCC’s recent experimentation trades with 30+ participants, tokenisation is already reducing operational settlement risk and improving efficiency in live transactions.
• Regulation and interoperability are key. Adoption pace hinges on regulatory clarity across the US, EU and Asia, and on connecting fragmented networks.
• Integration is the future. Beyond tokenisation of financial assets, the goal is a connected market enabling efficient DvP, collateralisation, and lending.

Tokenisation is moving beyond experimentation and could begin to reshape the architecture of financial markets. By bringing financial assets, cash and services onto programmable infrastructure, it has the potential to reduce certain operational silos between market participants, transform settlement and create new ways for institutions and clients to interact.

But what will it take to move from promising use cases to adoption at scale?

How is tokenisation reshaping financial market infrastructure?

Tokenisation is enabling a fundamentally new business architecture for financial markets, across the whole value chain. We can think of it in three layers: the blockchain rails, the tokens representing financial assets, and the services built on top.

Blockchain provides a shared ledger where transactions can be recorded securely and immutably using cryptography, while preventing double spending. However, blockchain only manages the transaction and the digital representation of the asset – at this stage of BNP Paribas’ initiatives – it does not, by itself, guarantee the existence or legal status of the underlying real-world asset. Trusted participants therefore remain essential to establishing and maintaining the link between tokens and the securities, cash or other assets they represent.

The fundamental shift is that this new business architecture can bring participants across the financial value chain onto shared infrastructure. In such case, instead of relying on separate systems and processes, participants can interact around the same tokenised assets and build new services on top of them.

What makes this new architecture potentially transformative?

Two developments are particularly important.

First, tokenisation can connect participants across the value chain, helping to break down traditional silos and create a “token economy” in which different players can interact and provide services around the same digital assets.

Second, different asset classes – such as cash and securities – can potentially coexist on common infrastructure. Combined with programmability, this creates opportunities to automate processes such as delivery-versus-payment (DvP), coordinating the transfer of an asset with its corresponding payment.

Together, these capabilities could help simplify certain aspects of today’s fragmented market infrastructure, increase automation and create new ways to transact and deliver financial services.

Where are we on the journey from experimentation to institutional adoption?

Tokenisation is a generational transformation. One possible way to look at it is a 20-year journey. Financial markets began seriously exploring blockchain around 2015, putting us today approximately halfway through that transformation.

The first decade was largely about maturing the technology – testing its capabilities, running pilots and proving individual use cases. We are now at a pivotal moment: institutions that have spent years experimenting are beginning to build products and increasingly looking at how to scale them.

The market remains nascent compared with traditional financial markets, and its development is unlikely to be linear. Adoption can accelerate rapidly around particular assets or use cases when regulation, infrastructure and market demand align. The next five years should therefore be increasingly about building the market – moving from individual experiments towards scalable products and infrastructure, with consolidation likely to follow as the ecosystem matures.

Can you share some BNP Paribas use cases and where tokenisation is creating tangible business value?

Over the past six years, we have progressively built and tested our tokenisation capabilities through concrete transactions and experiments. This has allowed us to develop expertise in two fundamental areas: (1) connectivity to blockchain networks and secure key management, and (2) the tokenisation of financial assets across both permissioned and public blockchain environments.

Our journey has included the EDF ENR renewable-energy project bond in 2022; our participation in the Eurosystem’s wholesale DLT settlement trials, including the Republic of Slovenia’s digital sovereign bond in 2024; and, more recently, an experiment involving a tokenised share class of a money-market fund on public Ethereum and the ANT Financial tokenised bank deposits in 2026.

We have also seen this play out at the market infrastructure level, with DTCC’s recent trades spanning 30+ participants, including BNP Paribas. The trades tested use cases from collateral management to DVP settlement, spanning both permissioned and public networks.

These initiatives are helping us identify where tokenisation can deliver tangible value.

One important opportunity is helping reduce certain forms of operational settlement risk through mechanisms such as DvP. Tokenisation can also provide greater self-service capabilities for sophisticated clients that want to interact directly with blockchain-based infrastructure.

It could also make new asset classes or smaller transactions more economically accessible by increasing granularity and simplifying processes. The EDF ENR transaction, for example, explored how tokenisation could support smaller renewable-energy financing while improving the transparency and traceability of ESG information.

For us, the objective is not tokenisation for its own sake. It is about identifying where the technology can make financial processes safer and more efficient, improve transparency and create new opportunities for clients.

What needs to happen for tokenised markets to reach the next stage of development?

The next five years will be critical. We expect major financial institutions to increasingly move from experimentation towards more standardised, ready-to-use tokenised products that can be integrated into existing financial workflows.

Regulatory clarity is likely to be an important catalyst. Furthermore, developments across major markets will influence how quickly financial institutions can deploy tokenised products and services at scale, as divergent or converging regulatory approaches in jurisdictions like the US, EU, and Asia shape the pace and consistency of global adoption.

Interoperability will be equally important. Today’s ecosystem remains fragmented across multiple blockchain networks and technologies. As the market matures, we are likely to see some consolidation, alongside solutions that enable different networks, assets and traditional financial infrastructure to interact.

As these foundations develop, we should start to see greater volumes in primary tokenised markets. That is when the broader benefits of blockchain can become more significant-not simply issuing a bond or fund digitally but putting tokenised assets to work within a connected financial ecosystem.

This could enable more efficient DvP, collateralisation, and lending and borrowing of tokenised assets. Ultimately, one possible direction for the market is to move from individual tokenised products towards a more integrated ecosystem where securities, cash and financial services can interact on programmable infrastructure.