Learning by Doing: How BNP Paribas Built Its Digital Assets Business

Quick Summary

Wayne Hughes, Digital Assets Market & Client Engagement Lead, Securities Services at BNP Paribas, describes six or seven years in digital assets as three distinct phases: educating the organisation and laying the technical foundations, a period of learning by doing in live environments, and now a renewed push to build the bank's first real form of product.

What did the early years of digital assets look like inside the bank?

Hughes is candid that the role has changed a great deal. At the start, most of the work was education: getting a large organisation engaged with a technology that few people understood. Alongside that came the job of laying foundations, and in particular the technical foundations for what the team believed would become future services. He lists the building blocks:

• Connectivity to distinct blockchains
• Wallet management
• Tokenisation capabilities
• Compliance, and the controls that sit around it

None of this is glamorous, but it is the plumbing that later decisions depend on. A custodian cannot offer a digital asset service to clients until it can connect, hold and control assets on-chain with the same discipline it applies elsewhere.

Why did the focus shift to learning by doing?

Over the last couple of years the emphasis moved to experimenting in a live environment. Hughes gives two reasons. The first was to put those technical foundations under real conditions. The second was to start engaging properly with clients and market counterparts, which a lab exercise cannot do. Then, around the end of last year and the start of this one, he describes a renewed focus on taking the next step: moving from experimentation to recurring activity and developing what the team considers its first genuine product.

What sits on the desk today?

The day-to-day is now a combination of delivery and exploration. Hughes describes four strands running in parallel:

• Executing on the initial product roadmap
• Continuing to explore newer, less mature use cases
• Keeping a close eye on the growing number of market initiatives
• Most importantly, working with clients to understand their future requirements and making sure the bank is ready to meet them

FF NEWS TAKE:

The honest version of a digital assets strategy rarely makes headlines: years of education, plumbing and small live tests before anything that looks like a product. Hughes lays that arc out plainly, and the most telling line is where he puts client requirements at the top of the list. The banks that win in tokenisation will be the ones whose roadmaps are shaped by what clients will actually use, not by what the market is announcing that week.