BNY Mellon is pushing deeper into blockchain for institutional finance, rolling out a blockchain-enabled version of its transfer agency business that will record fund ownership and investor transactions on a shared digital ledger.
Rather than merely tokenizing products, the New York-based custodian is applying distributed ledger technology to the backbone of fund operations: the books and records that track who owns what. The Financial Times reports the platform will maintain official ownership records onchain while BNY continues to operate its existing transfer agency services.
Transfer agents are central to fund mechanics — they log subscriptions and redemptions, update shareholder registers and manage investor communications. Today those records are typically spread across managers’, custodians’ and administrators’ systems, requiring frequent reconciliation. Putting the official register on a shared ledger aims to create a single source of truth, reduce duplicate databases and give authorized participants synchronized access to ownership data.
Carolyn Weinberg, BNY’s chief product and innovation officer, told the FT the project modernizes the books and records supporting fund transactions by migrating them onto blockchain infrastructure. BNY’s transfer agency business already supports roughly $8.6 trillion of assets across 7.6 million investor accounts; the bank separately oversees more than $59 trillion in custody and administration.
Early adopters include Edinburgh-based asset manager Baillie Gifford, which plans to use the platform for what it describes as 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. Baillie Gifford manages about $261 billion in assets. The FT also says BlackRock and BNY Dreyfus’ money market and cash management business are expected to use the platform for future tokenized fund offerings.
BNY has not disclosed which blockchain network will power the platform. Cointelegraph reached out to the bank but did not receive comment before publication.
The transfer-agency launch builds on several digital-asset moves BNY has rolled out in recent months. In June the bank added USDC minting, redemption, custody and transfer capabilities to its Digital Asset Custody platform, giving institutional clients direct access to Circle’s stablecoin through BNY’s infrastructure; BNY already serves as the primary custodian for the assets backing USDC. The bank has also partnered with Abu Dhabi’s Finstreet and the ADI Foundation to develop institutional custody services for Bitcoin and Ether, with plans to expand to stablecoins and tokenized real-world assets.
Regulatory progress in Europe has followed: the European Securities and Markets Authority recently added BNY SA/NV, the bank’s Belgian unit, to its interim Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) register after authorization from the National Bank of Belgium. That approval lets the subsidiary provide crypto-asset custody and transfer services under MiCA, positioning BNY alongside other financial institutions scaling regulated digital-asset operations across the EU.
Taken together, these moves show BNY extending blockchain across multiple layers of institutional infrastructure — from regulated crypto custody and stablecoin plumbing to the operational record-keeping systems that undergird tokenized investment funds. If widely adopted, onchain transfer agency records could streamline administration, speed fund settlements and reduce operational friction as tokenized funds gain traction.
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