Tokenisation of real-world assets has crossed the $100 billion mark. DTCC has received SEC approval to tokenise real-world assets from mid-2026. BlackRock, Franklin Templeton and JPMorgan have live tokenised funds. The New York Stock Exchange is developing a blockchain-based venue for 24/7 trading of tokenised securities. And in the UK, a consortium of six major banks including HSBC, Barclays and Lloyds is piloting tokenised sterling deposits on Quant Network infrastructure.
The story for institutional capital markets, however, has never been whether tokenisation is coming, rather it has been how to connect it to the systems that already run trading desks, risk engines, collateral management and regulatory reporting. The challenge is operationalisation without replacement.
A strategic partnership between Murex and Quant Network, announced in March, is designed to address exactly that gap. The integration brings Quant’s programmable money infrastructure – its Flow and Overledger platforms – into Murex’s MX.3, the cross-asset platform used by more than 300 institutions and 60,000 daily users across 65 countries for trading, risk and post-trade operations. The aim is to give banks and capital markets firms the ability to issue, settle and manage tokenised deposits and digital bonds within their existing operational framework.Gilbert Verdian, founder and CEO of Quant, frames the partnership around the operationalisation challenge rather than the technology itself. “Banks and capital markets firms know tokenisation is happening. The question they are working through is how to operationalise it without compromising the risk management, compliance and operational resilience they have spent decades building,” he says. “The next generation of capital markets infrastructure will not replace what works. It will make what works programmable.”
Live clients, growing pipeline
Critically, this is not a forward-looking proof of concept. Solène Khy, head of product for FX, equities, commodities and digital assets at Murex, tells TradingTech Insight that the partnership builds on work already under way.
“We already have clients running live production use cases on MX.3 today. These include digital and tokenised instruments – bond tokens and smart contracts that replicate OTC payoffs – deployed on both public and private DLTs as well as cryptocurrency trading,” she says. “In those setups, Murex acts as a bridge between on-chain execution and off-chain trading, risk and post-trade processes. We currently have ten clients live with MX.3 for Digital Assets, but there is a much wider pipeline – with over 40 clients who have approached us and we anticipate more to come next year.”
Khy adds that the trend is accelerating. Murex’s digital assets offering began with crypto trading several years ago, with early traction in APAC and the US. Over the past year, European demand has shifted decisively towards tokenisation use cases, using tokenised assets as collateral, lending, and extending the building blocks originally developed for crypto trading into CBDC support.
A deliberately loosely coupled integration
One of the more revealing aspects of the partnership is its architecture. Rather than a jointly engineered product, Murex has opted for a connector approach, a deliberate choice shaped by the realities of serving a global client base.
Leandre Moreno, head of product for position and data management at Murex, explains: “We want to deliver a connector that enables our customers to optionally activate the specific capabilities related to digital money, issuance and settlement of tokenised assets. We didn’t want to integrate directly with one specific custody system but rather provide a solution that can integrate to many, because we have clients across the globe and we’re confident that different regions and jurisdictions will require different regulated or regional custody solutions.”The connector establishes connectivity and interoperability through Quant’s Overledger gateway, preserving flexibility for clients to choose custody providers appropriate to their jurisdiction. Moreno notes that the integration could deepen over time depending on adoption and the evolution of the broader ecosystem, but stresses that the optional nature of the capability is a firm design principle.
“Depending on client use cases and adoption, we can extend this connector to cover more use cases than originally planned. And depending on how the ecosystem evolves, we may push the collaboration further towards a more deeply engineered production integration – while ensuring that it remains entirely optional,” he says.
Custody left to the specialists
Murex’s position on the division of responsibility between MX.3 and the custody layer is unambiguous.
“Those are specialised systems that do it well, and we believe the cryptographic elements of signing transactions, multi-signature frameworks and so on should be left to those experts,” says Moreno. “What we do provide is two additional layers. First, pre-trade compliance checks before sending an instruction to a custody system. Second, post-trade compliance checks when we receive a transaction or event from the blockchain. So we give our clients a control framework on top of instructions being sent and verified, without ourselves managing the underlying cryptographic operations.”
MX.3 can represent networks, digital wallet addresses, DTIs and the data types needed to reconcile with and send instructions to custody systems. Several Murex clients have already established direct, bidirectional integrations between MX.3 and their chosen custody providers.
TradFi and DeFi
The press release’s reference to “comprehensive coverage across both TradFi and DeFi” merits qualification. In practice, as Moreno explains, the goal is to represent tokenised assets within MX.3 and process them through the same regulatory, risk and post-trade frameworks as traditional instruments.
“A digital bond should ultimately be treated the same way as a standard bond – except that the settlement rail, the operations around settlement, and potentially the corporate actions execution will be different. But the regulatory framework, FRTB treatment, position management and collateral usage remain the same,” he says.
Moreno illustrates the point with the example of a standard bond and its digital twin managed within the same workflow – identical in structure, but materially different for anyone managing collateral or liquidity, given that one settles at T+2 and the other at T+0. He also points to fractionalisation as an emerging factor that will further differentiate the tokenised and traditional versions of the same instrument.
Regarding DeFi networks used by Murex’s clients: “They use both permissioned and permissionless blockchains, orchestrated in a regulated way, so they know to whom they are sending assets and from whom they are buying,” confirms Moreno. “They are still operating under institution-aligned compliance, permissioning and auditability standards.”
Regulation is driving regional traction – unevenly
The regulatory landscape is shaping adoption patterns in distinct ways across geographies but the picture is somewhat nuanced. Europe is furthest ahead in regulatory clarity. “MiCA has been a strong catalyst for banks to move from pilots to production-grade tokenisation programmes,” says Khy. “Over the past year we’ve seen significant traction – bond and stock tokenisation, money market funds, and gold.”
The US picture is more complex. “We haven’t yet seen any tangible impact of the SEC’s DTCC tokenisation approval on our client base directly. What has made a visible difference, however, is the GENIUS Act, particularly in driving the adoption and institutionalisation of stablecoins on various use cases,” Khy notes.
APAC, meanwhile, continues to move quickly. Khy highlights the MAS in Singapore as an example of a regulator working closely with banks, rapidly adopting Basel guidance, and providing the clarity that enables institutional engagement.
From a technology standpoint, Murex’s APIs are deliberately generic. The underlying integration does not change materially across jurisdictions. What varies is the choice of custody providers, and by extension the bespoke integration work required. The Overledger gateway adds a further layer of jurisdiction-agnostic orchestration.
The case against standalone digital asset platforms
With Broadridge, FIS and Ion all making moves in digital asset infrastructure for capital markets, the competitive question is whether tokenisation is best served by extending existing middleware or building purpose-built platforms. Murex is firmly in the extension camp.
“When institutions scale, what they need most is robustness, resilience and platforms that are proven at volume across the full trade lifecycle,” says Khy. “By extending that same platform to digital assets, firms don’t have to rethink their operating model or their regulatory framework – they build on something that is already industrialised, compliant and tested.”
The corollary, she argues, is that the alternative carries a structural risk. “Standalone digital asset platforms often look attractive at the innovation stage, but as soon as firms start scaling they face fragmentation. Integration cost becomes material at scale.”
It is a strategic argument that will resonate with Murex’s installed base, and one that the coming wave of production-scale tokenisation deployments will test in earnest.
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