BNY Mellon, one of the world’s largest custodian banks, is launching a blockchain-based transfer agency platform to move fund ownership records and investor transaction data onchain, marking a major step toward digital financial infrastructure.
The platform will maintain official records of fund share ownership and handle investor transactions, share issuance and redemption, and ownership record updates. Traditionally, this information is stored across multiple systems requiring frequent reconciliation. BNY’s onchain approach creates a shared source of information for market participants.
The move covers $8.6 trillion in assets currently managed through BNY’s transfer agent services, which handle 7.6 million accounts. BNY will maintain traditional transfer agency operations alongside the new digital platform.
Carolyn Weinberg, chief product and innovation officer at BNY Mellon, framed the initiative as modernization of core infrastructure. “We think of BNY as modernizing a function that sits behind every single fund transaction by bringing the books and records on-chain,” Weinberg said.
Baillie Gifford, an asset manager overseeing $261 billion in assets under management, will be an early user of the platform. The firm plans to use it for the first “fully native” UK-regulated tokenized fund. Theo Golden, head of digital assets at Baillie Gifford, emphasized the value of shared record-keeping. “What we have in the blockchain is a shared source of record-keeping between the participants. We agree that this is the source of truth when people are dealing with the asset that this is monitoring,” Golden said.
BNY Dreyfus, BNY’s money market fund and cash management business, is also expected to use the platform, as is BlackRock.
The expansion follows BNY’s regulatory progress under the European Union’s Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) framework, which has enabled the bank to advance its digital asset infrastructure in Europe.
BNY Mellon oversees $59 trillion in assets under custody and administration globally.
