BNY Moves Fund Records Onchain, Launching Blockchain-Based Transfer Agency

BNY is moving beyond tokenized products and putting the plumbing that runs investment funds onchain. The New York custodian bank told the Financial Times it will launch a blockchain-enabled version of its transfer agency business, putting official fund ownership records and investor transactions on a shared digital ledger while continuing to operate its existing transfer agency services. Rather than tokenizing only products, BNY is applying distributed-ledger tech to the record-keeping infrastructure that underpins fund operations — the books-and-records that transfer agents normally maintain across multiple, often-reconciled systems. Carolyn Weinberg, BNY’s chief product and innovation officer, described the project as modernizing the books and records that support fund transactions by moving them onto blockchain infrastructure. In practice, the platform will make the ledger of investor holdings a single source of truth for authorized participants involved in fund administration, reducing duplicate databases and the heavy reconciliation burden that comes from separate systems at managers, custodians and administrators. Scale and early adopters - BNY’s transfer agency business today supports roughly $8.6 trillion in assets across about 7.6 million investor accounts; the bank separately oversees more than $59 trillion in assets under custody and administration. - Among the first adopters is Edinburgh-based Baillie Gifford, which plans to use the platform for what it calls the U.K.’s first fully native regulated tokenized fund. “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,” said Theo Golden, Baillie Gifford’s head of digital assets. - The Financial Times also reports that BlackRock and BNY Dreyfus’ money market and cash management business are expected to use the platform for future tokenized fund offerings. Some technical and regulatory notes - BNY has not disclosed which blockchain network will power the new transfer agency platform. Cointelegraph reached out for comment but had not received a response before publication. - The launch builds on several recent BNY digital-asset moves. In June the bank added USDC minting, redemption, custody and transfer capabilities to its Digital Asset Custody platform — extending its existing role as primary custodian of the reserves backing USDC into operational stablecoin services. BNY said USDC was the first stablecoin supported on its custody platform, with additional stablecoins and digital cash workflows planned. - The bank has also partnered with Abu Dhabi’s Finstreet and the ADI Foundation on institutional custody services for Bitcoin and Ether, with a roadmap to include stablecoins and tokenized real-world assets. - On the regulatory front, BNY’s Belgian subsidiary, BNY SA/NV, was added to ESMA’s interim Markets in Crypto-Assets register after National Bank of Belgium authorization, enabling the unit to provide crypto-asset custody and transfer services under the EU’s MiCA framework. Why it matters By putting transfer-agent records onchain, BNY is attacking a longstanding operational pain point for funds: siloed ledgers and constant reconciliation. If broadly adopted, a shared, authorized ledger for ownership records could speed fund operations, reduce manual errors and lower costs — and further normalize blockchain as infrastructure at the institutional level. The move also signals BNY’s strategy to layer blockchain across custody, stablecoins and now the fundamental record-keeping systems that support tokenized investment funds.