BNY Is Putting $8.6T Worth of Fund Records Onchain, Because Ledgers Deserve a Glow-Up Too 📒

BNY, one of the world's largest custodian banks, will move ownership records for investment funds onto a blockchain, launching a digital version of its transfer agency business, according to a Financial Times report published Wednesday. The bank described the effort as an upgrade to the plumbing that sits behind every fund transaction, putting books and records on a shared ledger rather than across multiple siloed systems. Carolyn Weinberg, BNY's chief product and innovation officer, said, "We think of BNY as modernizing a function that sits behind every single fund transaction by bringing the books and records on-chain."

The platform is intended to give fund managers, custodians and transfer agents a single, shared source of record-keeping, reducing the need for manual reconciliation between separate databases. BNY has not disclosed which blockchain network will support the new service. The bank will continue to run its traditional transfer agency operations alongside the digital platform.

BNY's transfer agent services cover roughly $8.6 trillion in assets across 7.6 million accounts, the FT reported. The institution oversees more than $59 trillion in assets under custody and administration. Early users of the digital transfer agency include Edinburgh-based asset manager Baillie Gifford, which plans to use the platform for what it described as the first "fully native" United Kingdom-regulated tokenized fund. BlackRock and BNY's Dreyfus money market fund and cash management business are also expected to use the service for upcoming tokenized funds, and Baillie Gifford disclosed roughly $261 billion in assets under management on its website.

Theo Golden, Baillie Gifford's head of digital assets, said: "What we have in the blockchain is a shared source of record-keeping between the participants. We agree that this is the source of truth when people are dealing with the asset that this is monitoring." The initiative is part of BNY's broader digital asset expansion, which has included European regulatory progress under the EU's Markets in Crypto-Assets framework as the bank positions its services for further institutional adoption of blockchain-based infrastructure.