Ripple, a leading provider of blockchain-based enterprise solutions spanning traditional and digital finance, and SettleMint, a global leader in Digital Asset Lifecycle Management, have announced a strategic partnership that offers regulated financial institutions a unified solution to custody, issue, and manage tokenized assets across their full lifecycle. The partnership combines Ripple Custody, Ripple's institutional-grade digital asset custody infrastructure, with SettleMint's DALP (Digital Asset Lifecycle Platform).

Ripple Custody provides institutional-grade digital asset custody infrastructure and has continued to expand its capabilities over the past year through new partnerships with Securosys and Figment, an integration with Chainalysis, and the acquisition of Palisade. These moves simplify procurement and give banks, fintechs, and corporates a faster, less complex way to secure digital assets, stablecoins, and real-world assets.

SettleMint's DALP, meanwhile, is an institutional-grade, fully composable digital asset lifecycle platform designed for regulated financial institutions, market infrastructure operators, and sovereign entities. DALP is already in use across production and pre-production programmes with institutions in North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia Pacific, enabling them to design, issue, and manage tokenized real-world assets. Unlike point solutions that only handle token creation, DALP serves as a unified, governed control plane that manages the entire lifecycle of an asset post-launch. Issuance, compliance, custody, settlement, and servicing are managed on a single platform — without multi-vendor assembly, without reconciliation gaps, and with a controlled transition from pilot to production.

By combining Ripple's custody solution with SettleMint's DALP, an institution can hold and manage digital assets in a regulated, compliant, and safe manner across the full lifecycle through one integrated solution, rather than operating across separate vendors for custody, issuance, compliance, and servicing. This includes the compliance and permissioning controls required by heavily regulated institutions.

Ripple and SettleMint have already commenced their partnership offering in Asia and plan to extend it to other markets as institutional demand develops. The choice of Asia Pacific as the launch region aligns with the fact that several jurisdictions in the region have introduced regulatory frameworks for digital assets and tokenization, giving regulated institutions a clearer path to deploy such infrastructure. Fiona Murray, Managing Director, Asia Pacific at Ripple, said: "Financial institutions across Asia Pacific are putting digital assets to work. They are asking how to do more without stitching together separate solutions for custody, issuance and governance. This partnership gives them the foundation to roll out digital assets and future-proof them from there: Ripple Custody to hold and govern the asset, and SettleMint to manage its entire lifecycle."

The integration of digital assets and tokenized financial products has become essential for the future of banking and the traditional financial sector. In Boston Consulting Group's report, "The Future of Digital Assets," published in May 2026, the firm identifies the shift toward digital assets as a fundamental restructuring of financial infrastructure, projecting that tokenized real-world assets could reach $88 trillion by 2035. The report warns that traditional banks failing to adapt to this digital shift face a potential 30% reduction in profits by 2035.

The report also noted that banks can leverage tokenized products to transition from traditional intermediation to infrastructure orchestration, creating new revenue streams through tokenized funds, automated collateral mobility, and advanced custody solutions. It is against this backdrop that partnerships consolidating custody and lifecycle management into a single platform have gained traction among financial institutions seeking to move from pilots to production.

"Global capital markets are moving fully on-chain, and that shift only works when digital asset custody and lifecycle management operate as one system rather than two," said Adam Popat, CEO of SettleMint. "Combining Ripple Custody and DALP gives institutions that single foundation, and this partnership lets us bring it to regulated markets globally."