• Trust and securities services, Technology

  Where next for digital asset adoption?

Trust and securities services, Technology

4 November 2026

Clarissa Dann

Scaling digital assets to achieve the same level of trust as traditional finance assets was the talk of Sibos Miami’s securities services cognoscenti. So what has the progress been to date, and what lies ahead

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While 2026 has been a pivotal year for institutional adoption of tokenised finance, fragmented systems, unclear regulation and interoperability challenges have, according to Swift’s Head of Innovation Nick Kerigan, made it “challenging to scale”.¹

The flow article, ‘Custody: the bridge between digital assets and mainstream finance’, outlines how tokenised money and tokenised real-world assets are being used in practice and looks at adoption and scalability issues. These were the key themes driving discussions around digital assets at Sibos Miami 2026.

A year of momentum

Securities services panellists at Sibos (drawn from a mix of central bank, commercial bank, market infrastructure bodies and consultancies) agreed that while these obstacles to scalability remained, the year had seen some encouraging milestones. One such example was the 21 September launch of the Eurosystem’s Pontes solution, enabling wholesale tokenised asset transactions to be settled in central bank money.²

Panel discussions centred around the issues of interoperability, regulatory clarity and system fragmentation, and how the digital asset industry and the public sector is working together to address these and accelerate the move of tokenised finance from concept to mainstream.

In a flow perspectives video recorded at Sibos, Deutsche Bank’s Head of Digital Assets & Currencies Transformation, Sabih Behzad, noted: “There have been a lot of experiments and trials, but the scaling is missing. We are seeing more tokenised forms of assets coming on chain together with more client demand for instant atomic settlement, spurring development of the industry and growing the market and the need to work with digital assets from a real client perspective.”

Banking on trust

As Deputy General Manager of the Bank for International Settlements and former member of the Governing Board of the Swiss National Bank, Andréa Maechler was ideally placed to remind delegates of the importance of trust in a ‘Big issue debate’³ (see the flow article, ‘The journey towards new rails and agentic payments’ for more detail).

She highlighted that settlement is “the last and arguably most critical step in a transaction”. It is “the irrevocable and unconditional discharge of the obligation in accordance with the terms of the underlying contract”. She explained how banks typically do not exchange each other’s customer deposits. “Rather, they settle these claims at par using a standardised, risk-free settlement asset – central bank reserves – which is accepted without doubt or concern by any other bank.”

To replicate the safety in the new-generation monetary system, however, will require market infrastructure participants to solve the three issues highlighted by Kerigan: fragmented systems; interoperability challenges; and regulatory uncertainty.

Andréa Maechler, Bank for International Settlements, reminded delegates of the principles of safe and sound money

From concept to reality

When central banks use delivery versus payment (DvP) to ensure the delivery of a security and the payment of cash occur simultaneously, the cash leg settles using risk-free reserves or funds held directly at that central bank. But when they seek to do this once those securities or other traditional financial assets move to decentralised or tokenised platforms for trading and post-trade activities, this introduces more risk – not least to the trust in that central bank.

In the panel ‘How tokenised finance is moving from concept to reality’ John Jackson, Head of the Wholesale Payments Division at the Bank of England (BoE), noted: “When we think about the future evolution of our central bank settlement money arrangements, there is a big link to us understanding and helping to catalyse the changes happening on the digital asset side, so we can bring DvP together with central bank money.”

He confirmed that, together with the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), they were trying to “smooth the passage of digital assets onto people’s balance sheets and into the mainstream”, but acknowledged that the proliferation of regulatory initiatives risked creating a fragmented picture.

The BoE and FCA published their ‘shared vision for tokenisation in UK wholesale markets’ in May 2026, with a follow-up due in November.⁴ This roadmap responds to growing calls from market participants for greater regulatory and infrastructure certainty, setting out the two bodies’ approach to areas including prudential treatment, tokenised collateral and settlement instruments.

Panel session: ‘How tokenised finance is moving from concept to reality’. From left to right: Nick Kerigan (Swift); Eric Altafim (Banco Itaú Unibanco); John Jackson (Bank of England); Mónica Ramírez de Arellano (Anchorage Digital); and Olivier Sfartman (Societe Generale - Forge)

As Global COO of Societe Generale - FORGE, the digital-asset subsidiary of Societe Generale Group, Olivier Sfartman has seen regulation moving “from design to real capabilities and implementation”. He pointed out how Europe’s MiCA – like GENIUS in the US – “establishes the regulatory framework for digital assets and stablecoins”. It also deals with tokenised digital money, such as electronic money tokens.

This is distinct, he explained, from the EU’s Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) Pilot Regime,⁵ which provides a framework for tokenised instruments remaining within existing financial services regulation, such as MiFID II and CSDR. “While both are complementary and provide a regulatory foundation,” Sfartman continued, “we need reinforcement to push it at scale.”

Sfartman said he anticipates that “more clients will be requesting financial services providers to help them provide digital assets propositions”. This speaks to a point Deutsche Bank’s Behzad made around custody being the starting point for scaling digital assets, describing it as the “shopfront to the tokenised capabilities that a bank wants to have”.⁶

Aligning global rules for digital asset adoption

The theme of fragmented digital asset regulation was reprised by the panel ‘Regulation without borders: aligning global rules for digital asset adoption’, which took a deeper dive into the regulatory convergence needed before the industry can really scale.

An unfortunate backdrop was the failure of the US Senate to advance the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act. This, noted Marion Laboure and Camilla Siazon in their 16 September Deutsche Bank Research Institute report, passes crypto-security law regulation responsibility to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).⁷ Their report also provides a timely update on the global tokenised assets market.

The panel’s moderator Joseph Cox, a Partner at Oliver Wyman who specialises in digital assets, observed that while the SEC and the CFTC “are acting within their powers to provide clarity where they can, there is still a lot of uncertainty about the durability of that regulation”. He continued, “Europe has had an overarching framework for digital assets for a while, but in many ways the US (at least in the market) has been moving more quickly. And in Asia, there are many countries that already have some degree of regulation in place, but limited adoption.”

“The most compelling use case for digital assets is cross-border payments,” said Brent McIntosh, Chief Legal Officer and Corporate Secretary at Citi. This was highlighted in a 20 October Deutsche Bank Research Institute stablecoins report. Its authors note that “stablecoins have a strong use case for settling transactions for FX, treasury operations and collateral management, i.e. intraday repos”.⁸ Their 24/7 settlement can help address operational frictions in cross-border transactions.

McIntosh went on to explain, “If you have a situation where the primary use case for digital assets is cross-border payments, yet you don’t have any harmonisation across that jurisdiction that has those borders, you get inefficiencies, and you hinder the ability to adopt cross-border payments.”

This is because the regulatory and compliance hurdles that arise make it very difficult for financial institutions to participate. He also emphasised that a climate of regulatory fragmentation in any area of the financial world can “create a space for illicit finance”. While there is inevitable divergence on the substance of rules and timings of adoption across the US, Europe and Asia (while no legal regime can be identical, the rules of each bloc have to be interoperable) it was important, he said, to “land the plane so that all of those areas come together”.

Panel session: ‘Regulation without borders: aligning global rules for digital asset adoption’. From left to right: Joseph Cox (Oliver Wyman); Stanley Chan (CMU OmniClear); Brent McIntosh (Citi); Thilo Derenbach (Clearstream); Wayne Hughes (BNP Paribas); and John Siena (Brown Brothers Harriman)

In terms of what Europe needs to do to match the US’s momentum, Thilo Derenbach, Head of Sales and Business Development Digital Securities Services at Clearstream, said the momentum was there from individual countries, but not at a region-wide level: “Luxembourg has blockchain laws and in Germany we have the Electronic Securities Act. “You can name a few other countries in Europe that have created national domestic guardrails.” His point was that harmonisation across Europe “as a group of countries” would be a good start.

CMU OmniClear CEO Stanley Chan said that across Asia there was “substantial development in digital assets and the regulatory changes to support this”. However, domestic considerations make for very different approaches to regulation. Some jurisdictions decide to make new laws to support the development of digital assets, others try to interpret existing laws to support developments. Others go down the proof-of-concept route.⁹

“One of the reasons we have seen a move towards use cases that are doable in a contained setting is legal uncertainty,” reflected John Siena, Associate General Counsel and Co-Head of Regulatory Strategy at Brown Brothers Harriman. An example of this is set out in Unlocking Capital with US Tokenised Money Market Funds [TMMFs] for Collateral Mobility by Global Digital Finance and the International Swaps and Derivatives Association.¹⁰ The report assesses how TMMFs can improve collateral mobility, support more efficient margin management, and enable near real-time settlement while operating within existing market, legal and regulatory frameworks.

In a decentralised, permissionless world, how do you hold parties accountable – and who is there to regulate? The central securities depositories are ‘grasping the nettle’, said Siena, and addressing “what is doable” in the tokenised asset space. The DTCC has just launched its Tokenisation Service,¹¹ while the UK has its Digital Securities Sandbox.¹²

Out of the sandbox – but what’s next?

Digital assets may be out of the sandbox, but the broad message from Sibos was that securing their place in the mainstream financial system will require concerted effort across the industry.

The challenge now is less about proving what digital assets can do and more about creating the conditions for adoption at scale. That means greater regulatory certainty, robust infrastructure and, crucially, collaboration across an ecosystem that still has plenty of moving parts.

Sibos Miami took place from 28 September to 1 October 2026. Clarissa Dann is a freelance financial journalist and former Editorial Director, Marketing at Deutsche Bank

Deutsche Bank Research reports referenced

Asset Tokenization 101: the Next Phase of Financial Infrastructure by Marion Laboure and Camilla Siazon, Deutsche Bank Research Institute, 16 September 2026

Stablecoins – what next for crypto assets by Marion Laboure and Camilla Siazon, Deutsche Bank Research Institute, 20 October 2026

Sources

¹ See Digital assets: Into the mainstream at sibos.com
² See Eurosystem brings central bank money to tokenised finance at ecb.europa.eu
³ See Big issues debate: The sovereign money question: CBDCs, stablecoins, and the fight for the settlement layer at bis.org
⁴ See FCA and Bank of England set out shared vision for tokenisation in UK wholesale market at bankofengland.co.uk
⁵ See DLT Pilot Regime at esma.europa.eu
⁶ See Scaling digital assets: the role of custody at flow.db.com
⁷ See Asset Tokenization 101: The Next Phase of Financial Infrastructure at dbresearch.de
⁸ See STABLECOINS: What next for crypto assets? at dbresearch.com
⁹ See the flow whitepaper, ‘Regulatory outlook in securities services 2026’ for more updates on the regulatory landscape in Asia
¹⁰ See Unlocking Capital with U.S. Tokenized Money Market Funds for Collateral Mobility at gdf.io
¹¹ See DTCC Tokenization Service: The Start of What’s Next. at dtcc.com
¹² See Digital Securities Sandbox (DSS) at bankofengland.co.uk

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