Tokenisation Was Always Two Years Away. Here Is What Finally Changed

Quick Summary

Tokenisation has been "two years away" for the best part of a decade. Wayne Hughes, Digital Assets Market & Client Engagement Lead, Securities Services at BNP Paribas, explains what has moved the conversation from pilots to production: experimentation that paid off, regulatory clarity, growing technical comfort and large market initiatives that are finally pulling together an ecosystem.

Were all those pilots a waste of time?

Hughes argues the opposite. In his view the experimentation phase was a required step. The industry needed that first period to get comfortable with the technology and with what it could mean for post-trade. Just as importantly, running those experiments allowed banks to start addressing many of the challenges that were holding back scalability. The pilots did not deliver volume, but they cleared the ground that production now stands on. That framing matters for anyone tempted to read a decade of proofs of concept as a decade of failure.

What has actually changed in the last 12 to 18 months?

Hughes points to a combination of factors rather than a single breakthrough:

• Experimentation has started to pay off, with lessons from earlier work now being applied
• Regulatory clarity has improved, removing one of the major obstacles of the past
• The industry is more comfortable with the technical aspects
• Large, visible market initiatives are pulling together an ecosystem, which had been one of the remaining gaps

The last point is easy to underestimate. Tokenisation is a network problem: a single bank can build the capability, but it only creates value when counterparties, infrastructure providers and clients are on the same rails.

So has tokenisation arrived at scale?

Not yet, and Hughes is careful not to overclaim. From BNP Paribas' perspective the industry is still in pretty early days, and it may take some time before activity reaches significant volumes. What he does believe is that the industry has entered a new stage of its digital asset journey, one defined by production conversations with clients rather than yet another round of pilots.

FF NEWS TAKE:

There is something refreshing about a senior custodian banker who says both things at once: the shift is real, and the volumes are not there yet. That is the right posture for Sibos 2026. The question for Miami is not whether tokenisation works, but which ecosystems attract enough participants to make production worth the effort, and how quickly early production turns into something clients use every day.