Tokenisation Meets AI in Post-Trade? Not Yet, Says BNP Paribas

Quick Summary

With Sibos 2026 built around Digital Finance for AI-Driven Economies, Wayne Hughes, Digital Assets Market & Client Engagement Lead, Securities Services at BNP Paribas, offers a sober view: in post-trade there is not a lot of intersection between tokenisation and AI today, even though he expects the two to meet, starting with tokenised assets and cash that AI agents can use more easily.

Are tokenisation and AI converging in post-trade today?

Hughes does not go along with the hype. Right now, he says, BNP Paribas does not see a lot of intersection between the two in the securities post-trade world. There is plenty of conversation and many ideas about how they might combine, and intuitively most people believe they will. But in day-to-day post-trade activity, the overlap is not yet visible. For an industry event whose headline theme ties digital finance to AI-driven economies, that is a useful reality check from someone working on the digital assets side of a major custodian.

Where could they meet first?

In its simplest form, Hughes sees tokenisation as a potential way to make assets and cash more easily available to AI agents. If agents are going to act on behalf of clients, they will need programmable access to value, and tokenised instruments are a natural candidate for that. Projecting further out, he suggests AI could eventually be embedded in smart contracts, although he is clear that this is more intuition about the future than something the bank is seeing today.

What are clients actually asking for right now?

Elsewhere in the same conversation, Hughes explains where real demand sits today, which helps explain why AI convergence is not yet a priority:

• On the cash side, clients want extended operating hours for cross-border corporate payments
• In post-trade, many clients are preparing for their first production experience and want relatively simple use cases
• The market talks a great deal about collateral mobility, which he considers promising
• For BNP Paribas' existing clients, most demand is for tokenised money market funds, largely as a distribution play into retail channels

FF NEWS TAKE:

Every Sibos has a theme that dominates the stage, and Ali Paterson noted in the interview that the only headline theme that ever vanished completely was Y2K. AI will not go the same way, but Hughes is right to separate the story from the workflow. Tokenisation's near-term value is in simple production use cases. The AI agent layer will come, and when it does, the firms that have already tokenised real assets will be the ones ready to plug in.