BNY, the world's largest custodian bank with $59 trillion in client assets, also runs a transfer agency business that tracks roughly $8.6 trillion in fund holdings. That part of the business is now moving onto a blockchain.
A transfer agent is the back-office layer that keeps track of who owns what in a fund, processes purchases and redemptions, and handles dividend payouts. It's traditionally been a maze of separate databases run by banks and registrars, with constant reconciliation between the parties involved. BNY's new platform keeps those ownership records on a shared, public-blockchain ledger, while its existing systems keep running in parallel as the official books.
The first client is Baillie Gifford, the Scottish asset manager, which will launch a fully native, UK-regulated tokenized fund on the new rails. BlackRock and BNY's own Dreyfus unit are lined up to follow.
“We're modernizing the function behind fund transactions by bringing the books and records onchain,” says Carolyn Weinberg, BNY's chief product and innovation officer. Emily Portney, who leads the bank's asset servicing arm, is careful to add that the old rails aren't going anywhere: “trillions and trillions of dollars” will keep moving through existing systems for years to come — blockchain is an added option, not a replacement.
This isn't BNY's first crypto move. The bank has custodied bitcoin and ether since October 2022, expanded its USDC support with Circle in June, and plans pilot trades in tokenized US Treasuries on its own private blockchain before the end of 2026. The open question is whether other big asset managers follow Baillie Gifford's lead at scale, or whether tokenized fund shares stay a niche experiment for a while longer.
