New York —The next evolution of asset management will be “wallet-native,” not just digital, according to Sandy Kaul, chief innovation officer at Franklin Templeton.
Speaking at the Ondo Summit in New York on Tuesday, Kaul said he envisions a future where all financial assets – stocks, bonds, funds and more – are held and managed through tokenized digital wallets.
“The entirety of people’s assets will be represented in these wallets,” he said.
The panel, which included Cynthia Lo Bessette of Fidelity, Kim Hochfeld of State Street, and Will Peck of WisdomTree, agreed that tokenization is no longer a theoretical concept. After years of slow progress, a real infrastructure now exists and use cases are expanding beyond the first experiments. But the panelists also warned that building utility and trust is now the industry’s biggest challenge.
“The idea of bringing an asset and representing it on-chain with a token is the easy part,” said Lo Bessette, head of digital asset management at Fidelity. “The hardest part is building the ecosystem for the utility.”
Despite recent growth, adoption is still early. Hochfeld, State Street’s global head of cash and digital, said much of the current work is focused on internal and customer education.
“We don’t see an avalanche toward the gate yet,” Hochfeld said. “We have to experiment… and see what works.”
That includes explaining the systemic benefits of tokenization. Hochfeld pointed to the UK’s 2022 mini-budget crisis, when traditional fund redemptions created a liquidity spiral. She argued that tokenized funds could have served as instant collateral, easing the disruption.
“Here’s your perfect use case,” he said. “It suits money fund managers, collateral guarantors, regulators, everyone.”
WisdomTree’s Will Peck said customer interest is growing, particularly from crypto-native companies managing stablecoin treasuries or looking for profitable assets that remain on-chain. He compared the current tokenization wave to the launch of exchange-traded funds (ETFs) 30 years ago.
“No one at that time said, ‘I want an ETF,’” Peck said. “The ETF just performed better.”
That same pattern can now be applied to tokenized products. With new “universal liquidity layers” forming on the rails of blockchain, asset managers are preparing for a future of hyper-personalized, globally accessible and seamless portfolios.
“You’re not even going to notice it,” Kaul said. “It’s going to be so smooth and fluid.”
