Tokenized money market funds and digital bank deposits are shifting from experimental pilots to early-stage financial infrastructure, executives from Franklin Templeton, SWIFT and Ledger said Wednesday Consensus Hong Kong 2026.

“Take traditional, existing financial instruments, make them cheaper, better faster, by putting them natively on chain,” said Franklin Templeton’s Chetan Karkhanis.

The asset manager has focused on tokenizing money market funds, a roughly $10 trillion global asset class composed of short-term Treasuries and repos. By issuing fund shares natively on-chain and making them accessible via self-custody wallets or exchanges, Franklin Templeton aims to deliver 24/7 liquidity and reduce operational costs such as shareholder servicing fees, which can range from five to 15 basis points.

From the banking side, SWIFT is exploring how tokenized deposits — digital representations of bank liabilities — could modernize payments without disrupting balance sheets.

“You have fiat balances that banks have on their balance sheet… but as they move on the new digital form of value, the tokenized deposits represent these on chain,” said Devendra Verma of SWIFT's digital assets unit.

SWIFT, which connects more than 11,500 institutions globally, is building a blockchain-based orchestration layer designed to interoperate with central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), tokenized deposits and other regulated digital assets. While 75% of SWIFT payments already reach beneficiaries within 10 minutes, Verma said the ambition is to eliminate cut-off times and holiday delays in favor of “24/7, all time availability.”

Yet adoption remains modest relative to global capital markets. Karkhanis noted that roughly $300 billion in stablecoins and about $40 billion in tokenized treasuries and other real-world assets are now on-chain — “a drop in the ocean” compared with more than $200 trillion in global wealth.

Regulation is a key constraint. “Regulatory clarity is very, very important,” Verma said, pointing to the need for consistent standards around accounting, compliance and balance sheet treatment before institutions scale more aggressively.

Security and governance are another friction point. “How do we do that securely? With trust, with confidence, is the key question,” said Ledger’s Jean-François Rochet, arguing that managing private keys and institutional controls remains a cultural and technical hurdle.

Despite crypto’s origins in disintermediation, the panelists said the future is likely hybrid. “You can have it both ways,” Karkhanis said, suggesting decentralized access and traditional intermediaries will coexist. Some intermediaries may fall away, Rochet added, but those that remain will need to justify their role in a redesigned financial stack.