Bank of New York Mellon (BNY) is moving its transfer agency record-keeping business onto blockchain, aiming to create a single on-chain ownership ledger and reduce reliance on intermediaries, the Financial Times reported Thursday.
BNY, which has more than $59 trillion in assets under custody and administration, services about $8.6 trillion in assets across 7.6 million accounts through its transfer agency operations. "We think of BNY as modernizing a function that sits behind every single fund transaction by bringing the books and records onchain," said Carolyn Weinberg, chief product and innovation officer at the 242-year-old financial services company.
The bank said the shift would create a single record of ownership, cutting out the need for multiple intermediaries in fund transactions.
Initial Clients and Use Cases
- Baillie Gifford, a BNY client managing more than $261 billion, will use the service for what the companies describe as the first fully native U.K.-regulated tokenized fund, according to the FT.
- BlackRock and Dreyfus, BNY's money-market and cash-management business, are expected to use the infrastructure for planned tokenized funds.
- BlackRock, Franklin Templeton and other asset managers have already launched tokenized money-market funds that hold short-term debt and cash but issue ownership interests as blockchain tokens.
