BNY puts $8.6 trillion in fund ownership records on a shared blockchain ledger. Baillie Gifford will use the platform to launch the UK's first fully native regulated tokenized fund.
BNY is moving the ownership records behind hundreds of investment funds onto a shared digital ledger.
The custodian bank will launch a blockchain-enabled version of its transfer agency business, the Financial Times reported. The platform will maintain fund ownership records and investor transactions onchain while the bank continues to run its existing transfer agency services.
Transfer agents keep the official register of fund investors, process subscriptions and redemptions, update shareholder records and handle communications between funds and investors. Those records are typically spread across systems run by fund managers, custodians and administrators, requiring regular reconciliation.
Rather than tokenizing individual funds, BNY is applying blockchain technology to the record-keeping layer that supports fund operations. The shared ledger gives authorized participants access to the same source of ownership data, reducing the need for separate databases and the reconciliation they require.
The bank's transfer agency business supports roughly $8.6 trillion in assets across 7.6 million investor accounts, the FT reported. BNY separately holds more than $59 trillion in assets under custody and administration.
Carolyn Weinberg, BNY's chief product and innovation officer, told the FT the project modernizes the books and records that support fund transactions by moving them onto blockchain infrastructure.
Edinburgh-based Baillie Gifford is among the first institutions adopting the platform. It plans to use the service for what the firm described as the United Kingdom's first fully native regulated tokenized fund.
"What we have in the blockchain is a shared source of record-keeping between the participants," Theo Golden, Baillie Gifford's head of digital assets, said in the FT report. "We agree that this is the source of truth when people are dealing with the asset that this is monitoring."
BlackRock and the BNY Dreyfus money market fund and cash management business are expected to use the platform for future tokenized fund offerings, according to the report. Baillie Gifford manages roughly $261 billion in assets, its website shows.
BNY has not disclosed which blockchain network will power the platform.
The transfer agency launch is the latest in a series of digital asset initiatives from the bank.
In June, BNY added USDC minting, redemption, custody and transfer capabilities to its Digital Asset Custody platform, giving institutional clients access to Circle's stablecoin through the bank's infrastructure. BNY already served as the primary custodian for the assets backing USDC, and the rollout extended its role beyond reserve custody into operational stablecoin services. BNY said at the time that USDC was the first stablecoin supported on the custody platform and that additional stablecoins and digital cash workflows would follow.
That announcement came after the bank partnered with Abu Dhabi-based Finstreet and the ADI Foundation to develop institutional custody services for Bitcoin and Ether, with plans to add stablecoins and tokenized real-world assets later.
Earlier this week, the European Securities and Markets Authority added BNY SA/NV, the bank's Belgian subsidiary, to its interim Markets in Crypto-Assets register after authorization from the National Bank of Belgium. The approval lets the subsidiary provide crypto-asset custody and transfer services under the European Union's MiCA framework.
A growing number of banks and financial institutions are completing the licensing process after MiCA's transition deadline, and the authorization puts BNY alongside them in the regulated digital asset space in Europe.
BNY's ADI stock page shows an Alpha Score of 51 out of 100 with a Mixed label.
Drafted by a large language model from the source reporting linked above, then screened by automated publishing checks. It is not read by a journalist before publication. Some articles cite our Alpha Score. Verify prices and figures against the original source. Educational coverage, not personalized advice.