MAS kickstarts new round of asset tokenization pilots

finextra.com:

The initiative is an extension to MAS’ Project Guardian, in which the central bank collaborated with 15 financial institutions to carry out industry pilots on asset tokenisation in fixed income, foreign exchange, and asset management products.

The five new pilot projects explore a new set of use cases including listing, distribution, trading, settlement, and asset servicing.

• Citi, T. Rowe Price. and Fidelity International are testing institutional-grade mechanisms to price and execute bilateral digital asset trades efficiently, and explore real-time post-trade reporting and analytics of digital asset trades.
• BNY Mellon and OCBC are trialling a cross-border FX payment product.
• Ant Group is testing a treasury management service for real-time multi-currency clearing and settlement through its global treasury centre in Singapore which supports over 40 currencies.
• Franklin Templeton is exploring the issuance of a tokenised money market fund through a Variable Capital Company (VCC) structure, which utilises digital asset networks to maintain the records of fund shares.
• JPMorgan and Apollo are collaborating on the use of digital assets for investment and management of discretionary portfolios and alternative assets, automated portfolio rebalancing and customisation at scale.

Singapore's central bank is additionally opening a new Project Guardian funds workstream focused on the native issuance of Variable Capital Company (VCC) funds on digital asset networks.

MAS is also collaborating with international policymakers and FIs including BNY Mellon, DBS, JP Morgan and MUFG to explore the design of an open, digital infrastructure that will host tokenised financial assets and applications. This new initiative, called Global