Securitize's NYSE Debut Lands Thursday—But Its President Is Eyeing Wall Street's Lunch 🍴

Securitize President Brett Redfearn, the SEC's former director of trading and markets who joined the firm in April, said tokenization could pull billions in retail lending revenue away from brokerages by routing it through decentralized finance instead. On Thursday, Securitize's stock is expected to begin trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol "SECZ," putting a marquee tokenization company directly in front of Wall Street investors.

Redfearn pointed to retail stock lending as a clear example of where the math favors disintermediation. Today, brokerages loan out customers' idle shares to short-sellers and keep the bulk of the proceeds. Robinhood retains around 85% of associated revenue, while Charles Schwab splits revenue roughly evenly with clients, according to NerdWallet. Cutting out the centralized middleman, Redfearn argued, lets individual investors keep more of the returns their assets generate.

"I think that business is totally disruptible," Redfearn said in an interview with Decrypt. "There's a lot of opportunities when you start to disintermediate traditional businesses." He framed the broader push to bring real-world assets on-chain as an extension of crypto's core ethos, one that gives consumers direct control over how their holdings are used rather than surrendering that control to intermediaries.

While Securitize has built its profile by helping major issuers including BlackRock bring securities on-chain, Redfearn acknowledged that DeFi's growth depends on a much wider community of developers. "I believe that the sky's the limit in terms of what builders are going to be able to achieve that's going to bring benefits for investors who are interested in participating in this sort of tokenized securities ecosystem," he said.

The launch comes as competitor platforms appear to be moving in a similar direction. Robinhood is expected to unveil new products on Wednesday, and Compass Point analyst Ed Engel wrote in a recent note that "tokenized equities compatible with DeFi" will likely be among them, following the firm's earlier experiments with tokenized shares for European customers.