Tokenisation: BNP Paribas makes slow but steady progress

Wednesday, November 1, 2023

Like its competitors, France's largest bank is also moving into the Web3 world, notably with a platform for tokenising digital assets.

Discreet, to say the least. While Société Générale, via its subsidiary SG-Forge, regularly communicates on its progress on the tokenisation of assets on blockchain, its main competitor, BNP Paribas, is less talkative on the subject. Yet it has nothing to envy it.

According to our information, France's leading bank is "at least as well advanced" as its rival on tokenisation issues, says a good source.

"Because of its status as leader, it has less interest in communicating than Société Générale, which may see cryptos as an opportunity to catch up," explains a sector observer.

A discretion that can also be explained by the fact that BNP "internalises" much of the work in the field via its BNP Paribas Corporate and Institutional Banking (CIB) division. Currently, it works with two custodians at once, namely Metaco and Fireblocks.

The eurozone's largest bank (in terms of capitalisation) has developed its own token management platform called Asset Foundry compatible with Ethereum. It received media coverage when the group carried out the first distribution of tokenised bonds with EDF to finance a solar project in July 2022. A few months earlier, BNP Paribas had become the first European bank to join Onyx, JP Morgan's private blockchain 🇺🇸.

Note, however, that BNP Paribas is still fairly conservative about public blockchains and the possibility of offering crypto services to investors. For the time being, none of the group's entities has obtained registration as a digital asset service provider (DASP). Its status as a leader should certainly not encourage it to come out of the woodwork too soon...

This analysis is not investment advice. It has been prepared without taking into account your personal situation, particularly your financial situation, risk profile, and investment objectives.

Before investing in any product, investors should fully understand the risks involved and consult their own legal, tax, financial, and accounting advisors.

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