The future of asset management is shifting on-chain, but the transition is exposing a major structural conflict over traditional corporate revenue.
On a panel at the Proof of Talk summit in Paris, Jenny Johnson, CEO of Franklin Templeton, a $1.74 trillion asset manager, openly addressed the industry’s hesitancy in implementing decentralized networks. According to Johnson, major financial companies are dragging their feet because the public blockchain architecture directly challenges their current profitability.
“This technology threatens a lot of the business models that exist in traditional finance today,” Johnson stated bluntly. “If you see any kind of hesitation, it’s because there’s a threat to the business model. Think about toll collectors in a transaction.”
He explained that if a blockchain can handle settlement instantly through a smart contract, big banks will no longer be able to charge transaction fees as third-party intermediaries.
While crypto-native networks favor open architecture, traditional financial systems are beginning to migrate to public networks due to significant transaction efficiencies. To demonstrate the cost savings, Johnson cited Franklin Templeton’s history of managing his tokenized money market fund, Benji, on public networks.
“It was a hell of a lot cheaper,” Johnson explained, breaking down the internal data. “It cost us about $1.30 per transaction for 50,000 transactions on the old system. And it cost us about $1.13 to run it on the Stellar blockchain.”
Johnson’s mention of Benji comes just hours after the Wall Street giant announced that it is expanding its digital asset strategy through a new partnership with MoonPay that will allow institutional investors to move between stablecoins and the asset manager’s tokenized money market fund via an on-chain workflow.
“In everyday life, any person (individual, medium or large company) wants to have a trusted person,” Johnson said. “We do not want to keep our assets in our private wallets, in our safes at home. We want to delegate this peace of mind to a third party. And that is why custodians or banks still have a future.”
The shift of institutional wealth toward digital assets will depend entirely on building standard, low-cost compliance pathways for legacy investment funds. While Blockstream CEO Adam Back noted that bitcoin allows users to maintain true fiscal privacy without an institutional partner, Johnson concluded that standard investors will continue to demand a heavily regulated custody layer.
