In the changing landscape of digital finance, Big Four consulting firm EY has focused on what it believes is the next defining frontier: wallets.
According to Mark Nichols, director at EY, wallets are quickly becoming the fundamental interface for the next era of financial services, not just tools for storing cryptocurrencies.
“The wallet is the strategy,” Nichols, who co-heads the company’s digital asset consulting business, told CoinDesk in an interview. “Whoever owns the wallet, whoever provisions it, will win the customer relationship.”
Nichols and her West Coast counterpart, Rebecca Carvatt, see the wallets as more than just infrastructure. They are the gateway to storing, moving and managing tokenized value in a world where financial instruments, from payments to private credit, increasingly move on-chain, he said.
Not just custody: wallets as the center of tokenized finance
The vision is expansive. Far from being a niche utility for cryptocurrency enthusiasts, wallets are becoming the connective tissue of a broader tokenized financial system. Wallets will soon be indispensable for retail investors, asset managers, treasurers and even commercial banks, according to Carvatt, co-head of EY’s digital asset consulting business.
“They will be the access point for everything: payments, tokenized assets and stablecoins,” he said.
EY’s perspective positions wallets as the new bank accounts of the future, with services designed not only for individuals, but also for corporations and institutional investors that require sophisticated integration with risk systems, compliance tools and real-time capital flows.
The implication is clear: whoever controls the wallet controls the relationship. For financial institutions that are already losing ground to crypto-native platforms, the change is existential.
Beyond liquidity: the true promise of tokenization
The broader shift toward tokenization is often portrayed as a play for liquidity, but EY believes that narrative understates the true impact. “It’s not just about liquidity,” Nichols says. “Liquidity is not the be all and end all, it is about the utility that on-chain finance enables.”
What EY sees instead is the emergence of blockchain as a real-time infrastructure for financial markets, enabling programmable chains of transactions and fundamentally reshaping the way capital is managed. Tokenization enables atomic settlement, of course, but its true power lies in optimizing margins and operational efficiency.
Nichols points out scenarios where companies can use stablecoins or tokenized assets to meet margin requirements more frequently and accurately. This, in turn, reduces initial margin requirements, freeing up capital for investment. “It’s about better risk alignment and real-time capital management,” he says. “And the wallet becomes the gateway to making it possible.”
A Decade in Space: EY’s Deep Crypto Bank
While some companies are rushing to catch up, EY has been building in the digital assets space for over 12 years. Its early investments in crypto-native audit and compliance practices now span thousands of professionals, supporting everything from hedge fund tax returns to tokenized M&A advice.
“We’ve worked with all client profiles: big banks, asset managers, exchanges, digital natives, infrastructure providers,” says Nichols. “And I have been working in the digital asset ecosystem for over a decade.”
EY’s hedge fund audit business was one of the first to support cryptocurrencies, and its advisory team has helped companies prepare for public listings and complex regulatory environments. The company has developed custom services for wallet monitoring, on-chain compliance, and token-native tax reporting. He also continues to advise traditional financial institutions on how to design secure and compliant digital asset strategies, particularly as they begin to develop or integrate wallet infrastructure.
Wallets for everyone: a segment-by-segment view
EY is clear that wallet needs are not monolithic. Consumers want a seamless user experience and secure access to payments and cryptocurrencies. Companies need integration with treasury functions and regulatory compliance across jurisdictions. Institutional clients demand secure custody, connectivity to decentralized finance (DeFi) and staking products, and integrated risk tools.
Self-custody, EY maintains, will not be common. The average user or institution does not want to manage their own private keys. Instead, trusted wallet providers will emerge: banks, fintechs or specialized custodians; each one adapts its offer depending on the segment it serves.
Provisioning portfolios then becomes a strategic imperative. Whether companies decide to create their own companies, acquire suppliers or form partnerships, the wallet is the new gateway to financial services. Companies that act now will reduce future customer acquisition costs and possess a more defensible position in the digital asset ecosystem.
Regulation: a catalyst, not an obstacle
One of the most persistent beliefs about tokenization is that regulation is an obstacle. But EY leaders disagree. “We already have the regulatory framework in place in the major markets and, together with the broader industry, passing market structure legislation will resolve the remaining issues,” Nichols says. “A security is a value, a commodity is a commodity. Blockchain is technology.”
In the US, the GENIUS Act and existing exemptions from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) provide avenues for tokenized products to comply. Globally, jurisdictions are racing to attract innovation in digital assets with evolving licensing regimes. While harmonization is still underway, the momentum is unmistakable.
EY sees this moment as a call to maturity, an inflection point where infrastructure is achieving the vision. “We’re past the experimentation phase,” says Carvatt. “Now it’s a secure, scalable deployment.”
Rethink asset management from the ground up
Perhaps nowhere is the impact of tokenization and wallet infrastructure more profound than in asset management. Currently, a typical fund requires a distribution network, an investment team, a custodian, a fund manager and regulatory reporting channels. With tokenization and smart contracts, much of that stack becomes programmable and potentially obsolete.
“Asset managers just want to build great portfolios,” says Nichols. “Blockchain allows them to do that without all the legacy friction.”
By tokenizing fund underlyings and embedding the logic in smart contracts, asset managers can automate functions such as distribution, compliance, and reporting. This opens the door to lower fees, broader access to investors and new types of products, particularly in private credit and alternatives, where cost has historically been a barrier.
“From the unbanked to the unbrokered, we are seeing more and more people gain exposure to assets that were previously out of reach,” says Carvatt. “That’s powerful.”
The future of finance is on chain
Whether for cryptocurrencies, payments or tokenized assets, wallets will be the gateway to a new financial reality. Companies that ignore this will risk losing relevance. Those who adopt it will own the infrastructure and customer relationships that are at the heart of digital finance.
“The future of finance is on the chain,” says Nichols. “And the wallet is in the center.”
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