BNY Puts $8.6T of Fund Books Onchain, Because Spreadsheets Were Getting Lonely 📜

BNY is moving the records behind $8.6 trillion in fund assets onto a blockchain, launching a digital version of its transfer agency business while keeping its legacy transfer agency operations running in parallel. The New York-based custodian, which oversees more than $59 trillion in assets under custody and administration, will use the new platform to maintain shareholder ownership and process investor transactions as a shared onchain ledger, aiming to cut reconciliation between fund managers, custodians and other market participants. "We think of BNY as modernizing a function that sits behind every single fund transaction by bringing the books and records on-chain," Carolyn Weinberg, BNY's chief product and innovation officer, said.

Transfer agents keep the official record of who owns shares in investment funds, handling share issuance, redemptions, ownership updates and communications with investors. BNY's transfer agency services cover about $8.6 trillion in assets across roughly 7.6 million accounts, according to the report. The bank has not disclosed which blockchain network will support the platform, and BNY Global Head of Asset Servicing Emily Portney said "trillions and trillions of dollars" in funds will continue using existing rails. The move extends BNY's digital asset expansion, which already includes custody support for $BTC, $ETH and $USDC, along with regulatory work in Europe under the EU's Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) framework.

Early users of the platform include Edinburgh-based asset manager Baillie Gifford, which plans to use it for what it described as the first "fully native" UK-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. Baillie Gifford, which lists roughly $261 billion in assets under management on its website, framed the blockchain as a neutral record layer. "What we have in the blockchain is a shared source of record-keeping between the participants," said Theo Golden, Baillie Gifford's head of digital assets. "We agree that this is the source of truth when people are dealing with the asset that this is monitoring," he added.

By placing transfer agency records on a shared ledger, BNY is positioning the new platform as common infrastructure for tokenized fund issuance, with traditional transfer agency kept in place for funds that remain on existing systems. The bank has not announced a launch date or a blockchain partner for the platform.