It’s a pleasure to be here at DC Fintech Week 2025 to speak about tokenisation and Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), given their potential to transform real world retail and wholesale financial services.

This technology allows the creation of common shared ledgers that can be updated near-simultaneously across all parties in a financial transaction, thereby eliminating the need for each party to maintain its own records.

It enables financial assets to be digitally represented (‘tokenised’) on such shared ledgers and settled near instantaneously.

And in this way, it can facilitate faster, cheaper processes in wholesale financial markets and cross-border payments – with fewer intermediaries, less operational risk, shorter settlement windows and smart contracts automating processes such as coupon payments on bonds.

In addition, these ledgers can increase the liquidity of a wider range of financial assets (for example private assets, units in investment funds, or real estate), enabling them to be held, traded or even used as collateral by a broader set of players. Assets can also be ‘fractionalised’ so that investors can hold a portion (eg of a property) if they can’t afford the whole.

Applied to retail payments, these technologies can offer households and businesses new functionality – embedding payments more deeply, automatically and efficiently into our increasingly digital lives.