BNY CEO: Tokenization Is a Megatrend

Robin Vince, CEO of BNY, recently said during an interview on CNBC that tokenization is “a megatrend”. BNY sits at the center of global markets plumbing, overseeing $58 trillion in assets under custody and/or administration. In public markets, its equity story is also unmistakable, with about $84.6 billion in market capitalization.

The BNY CEO’s remarks reflect the positioning of tokenization as a structural shift, and they are yet another signal that the institutions responsible for custody, settlement, and collateral are preparing for tokenized rails to become a key standard in market operations.

What’s striking is how quickly that framing is being echoed—across bank money, fund infrastructure, regulated issuance, and enterprise tooling—to the point that it's been only two months since we last highlighted the highest signals from the industry going into 2026.

The money layer for on-chain settlement keeps evolving

If assets move on-chain, money must move on-chain with comparable trust, speed, and compliance. This is major constraint on tokenized assets that has been solved by stablecoins, and there have been several strong indications that banks are now treating that layer as strategic.

Barclays just took a stake in Ubyx, a startup building a clearing and settlement system for stablecoins—effectively infrastructure intended to let multiple stablecoin issuers settle and redeem in a more standardized way, while staying inside a “regulatory perimeter” framing.

At the same time, the UK is producing new examples of what tokenized bank money (different from stablecoins) looks like in practice. The Financial Times reported that Lloyds is pushing deposit tokenization, citing the use of tokenized deposits to buy UK gilts.

Zooming out even further, ten major banks are exploring whether to issue stablecoins pegged to G7 currencies—a list that included Bank of America, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, UBS, Citi, MUFG, Barclays, TD Bank, Santander, and BNP Paribas.

The direction is unambiguous: the largest banks are now assessing how to compete in tokenized settlement without outsourcing their money layer to non-bank issuers.

Tokenized cash: a mainstream institutional product

With a robust money leg already in place via stablecoins and, increasingly, via tokenized deposits, tokenization is set to become a full-on upgrade to how collateral and liquidity move via cash equivalents.

In that sense, tokenized money market funds continue to hit the market. J.P. Morgan Asset Management announced the launch of its first tokenized money market fund—My OnChain Net Yield Fund (MONY), available on Ethereum, bringing a classic institutional cash management product into an on-chain form factor.

Tokenized assets become more usable when the instruments used as “cash,” margin, and collateral are also tokenized—and can move with the same speed, atomicity, and programmability.

End-to-end tokenized fund workflow

UBS announced what it described as the first successful completion of an “in-production, end-to-end tokenized fund workflow,” leveraging the Chainlink Digital Transfer Agent (DTA) technical standard. The story here is less about a single token and more about the workflow: subscriptions, redemptions, and fund lifecycle events are exactly the kind of “financial back office” processes where automation and standardization can compound into significant cost and speed advantages.

Interoperability starts to rise

Tokenized assets make the most sense when they operate at a global scale. Cross-border applicability—especially for corporate treasuries—is an integral part of the equation. That’s why Bloomberg’s report on HSBC is relevant: HSBC plans to offer tokenized deposits to corporate clients in the U.S. and the UAE in the first half of 2026. The most important takeaway is the scope: tokenized deposits are being positioned as a payments-and-treasury service that is fully functional across major financial corridors.

Big tech is packaging tokenization into bank-ready infrastructure

Not every tokenization milestone comes from a bank. Some of the most important signals are when enterprise vendors start treating tokenization as a standard feature set rather than bespoke developments.

Oracle announced Digital Assets Data Nexus, positioning it as a platform for banks that bundles multi-ledger infrastructure, pre-built tokenization smart contracts, and compliance and reporting capabilities. Put simply: tokenization is being “productized” into the kind of procurement-friendly, integration-heavy tooling that large financial institutions actually buy and deploy.

Central-bank-adjacent tokenization is targeting short-term debt markets

Finally, tokenization touches regulated short-term funding markets. Banque de France and Euroclear announced Project Pythagore, a joint initiative to tokenize Negotiable European Commercial Paper (NEU CP) using distributed ledger technology. This isn’t a retail narrative; it’s about upgrading market infrastructure for instruments that sit close to the heart of institutional liquidity management.

A powerful common thread

Across these headlines, strong signals emerge:

• Tokenization is now framed as market infrastructure, not a new asset class (custody, settlement, collateral, fund ops).
• The industry is approaching scape velocity on two critical building blocks: tokenized money (stablecoins and tokenized deposits) and tokenized cash equivalents (like tokenized money market funds).
• Corporations emphasize production readiness and regulated perimeter positioning.

BNY’s CEO calling tokenization a “megatrend” is compelling because of BNY’s scale, but the bigger story is what surrounds it: another cluster of real infrastructure moves that collectively point toward tokenization becoming a default option for how financial value is issued, moved, serviced, and settled.