BNY Moves $8.6 Trillion Transfer Agency Business onto Blockchain

The world's largest custodian bank, BNY, is transitioning its core transfer agency record-keeping operations onto blockchain rails, aiming to establish a single on-chain ownership ledger and reduce dependence on intermediaries. Transfer agents serve as the authoritative record-keepers for fund ownership, processing investor subscriptions, redemptions, distributions, and corporate actions — a back-office function that has remained largely unchanged for decades and underpins trillions of dollars in daily fund activity. The initiative will initially serve clients including Baillie Gifford, BlackRock, and BNY's own Dreyfus unit, supporting what the parties describe as the first fully native U.K.-regulated tokenized fund along with other planned tokenized products.

According to a report by the Financial Times on Thursday, BNY — which holds more than $59 trillion in assets under custody and administration — is migrating one of its fundamental record-keeping businesses to blockchain infrastructure as Wall Street builds out the plumbing for tokenized funds.

"We think of BNY as modernizing a function that sits behind every single fund transaction by bringing the books and records onchain," said Carolyn Weinberg, chief product and innovation officer at the 242-year-old financial services institution.

BNY currently services approximately $8.6 trillion in assets across 7.6 million accounts. The bank stated that shifting its transfer agency onto blockchain would produce a unified record of ownership, eliminating the need for multiple intermediaries in the process.

"We fully recognize you've got trillions and trillions of dollars' worth of funds that... will continue to exist on traditional rails," said Emily Portney, BNY's global head of asset servicing, the bank's largest business division.

BNY did not immediately respond to a CoinDesk request for additional comment.

Baillie Gifford, a BNY client managing more than $261 billion in assets, will leverage the service for what the companies call the first fully native U.K.-regulated tokenized fund, according to the Financial Times. BlackRock and Dreyfus — BNY's money-market and cash-management arm — are expected to use the platform for forthcoming funds.

BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, and other asset managers have introduced tokenized money-market funds in recent years. These vehicles hold short-term debt and cash but issue ownership interests as blockchain tokens. The tokenization of real-world assets has drawn projections from major consulting firms, with Boston Consulting Group estimating the market could reach $16 trillion by 2030, underscoring the scale of opportunity that institutions like BNY are positioning to capture.

Edwin Mata, CEO and founder of tokenization platform Brickken, estimates that Wall Street will operate entirely on blockchain technology by 2030. Separately, America's largest banks — including JPMorgan, Citi, and Bank of America — plan to construct a shared, tokenized deposit network by the first half of 2027, aimed at protecting their deposits from the competitive threat posed by stablecoins.

BNY does not anticipate that legacy systems will vanish, the Financial Times noted. The bank intends to maintain its traditional transfer agent and acknowledges that trillions of dollars in fund assets will stay on existing infrastructure for years. Blockchain technology also introduces cybersecurity concerns, including potential vulnerabilities in smart contracts and the bridges that connect different networks.

BNY is wagering that a consolidated ownership ledger can supplant some of the expensive reconciliation work that currently flows through fund administration, where multiple parties must independently verify and match ownership records across disconnected systems.