Tokenisation After the Experiment Years: What Euroclear Says Has Changed

Quick Summary

After years of experiments and speeches, Isabelle Delorme, Global Head of Product Strategy & Innovation at Euroclear, says what has changed in tokenisation is clarity on common expectations. Capital markets users want three things: to move assets and collateral across markets and ledgers, less operational friction and interoperability. Underneath it all, what matters is trust, resilience and liquidity efficiency.

What has changed in tokenisation?

Delorme gives what she calls a personal answer. What has changed for her is that there is now clarity on the common expectations. After years of experiments and years of speeches, it is clearer what the industry is trying to achieve.

She describes it as the beginning of a plan. With such a transformative technology, it is natural for innovation to go in all directions and for there to be a lot of distractions. The important question now is simply: at the end, what do we want to achieve?

What do capital markets users actually want?

Delorme notes that nobody wants more fragmentation, and sets out three clear expectations:

• Mobility: the ability to move assets and collateral across markets, across networks and now across ledgers
• Less operational friction: always less glamorous, but so important, and exactly what this technology brings
• Interoperability between technologies, use cases and players

Why should infrastructures avoid being "techno evangelists"?

Delorme is clear that Euroclear should not be a techno evangelist. As an organisation driving infrastructure, it has to keep in mind that behind those three expectations, what matters is trust, resilience and liquidity efficiency.

The most important test, she says, is whether the transition to digital assets and DLT comes with greater liquidity efficiency. New use cases cannot come at the expense of trust or liquidity efficiency: yes to technology, but not at the expense of the core promise that all infrastructures have been delivering so far.

FF NEWS TAKE:

Tokenisation has spent years being two years away. Delorme's answer explains why the tone has changed: the industry has stopped asking what the technology can do and started agreeing what it is for. Her three expectations, mobility, less friction and interoperability, are a practical scorecard, and liquidity efficiency is the right final test. An infrastructure that insists on keeping its core promise while it modernises is the kind that clients will actually move onto.