BNY Moves $8.6 Trillion in Fund Records Onchain With New Transfer Agency Platform

BNY, the world’s largest custodian bank with more than $59 trillion in assets under custody and administration, is putting $8.6 trillion of fund-ownership records tied to 7.6 million investor accounts onto a blockchain-based ledger. The New York-based institution is launching a digital version of its transfer agency business, the unit that tracks who owns shares in investment funds, according to a Financial Times report cited by Cointelegraph and CoinGape.

The scale of the migration is the headline figure here: $8.6 trillion in transfer-agency assets is a large slice of the plumbing that keeps mutual funds and other pooled vehicles running, and moving it onchain would mark one of the biggest single transfers of legacy fund infrastructure to blockchain rails to date.

What a transfer agent actually does

Transfer agents maintain the official books of who owns shares in a fund, process investor transactions, issue and redeem shares, and reconcile records across fund managers, custodians and other market participants. Today that reconciliation typically happens across multiple disconnected systems, creating friction and cost for every fund transaction.

BNY’s new platform is designed to replace that patchwork with a shared, on-chain ownership ledger. Carolyn Weinberg, BNY’s chief product and innovation officer, described the shift in blunt terms: “We think of BNY as modernizing a function that sits behind every single fund transaction by bringing the books and records on-chain.”

Crucially, BNY says it will keep running its traditional transfer agency operations in parallel with the new digital platform rather than switching clients over all at once, an approach that reduces near-term operational risk for the trillions in assets involved.

Part of a broader digital-asset build-out

The transfer agency launch extends BNY’s digital asset footprint beyond its existing custody support for Bitcoin, Ethereum and USDC. The bank has also been advancing its regulatory standing in Europe under the EU’s Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) framework, positioning itself to serve institutional clients across both crypto-native assets and tokenized traditional finance.

For crypto investors and builders, the move is a concrete data point in the tokenization narrative: a systemically important custodian bank is putting real, multi-trillion-dollar volumes of fund records onto blockchain rails, not a pilot or a press release about future plans. That distinction matters because it signals institutional infrastructure spend rather than experimentation.

Baillie Gifford is reported to be among the early users of the new platform, though full onboarding details have not been disclosed. As more asset managers plug fund share records into blockchain-based systems, the reconciliation costs and settlement delays that have long defined traditional fund administration could shrink, a shift worth watching for anyone tracking how tokenized finance moves from niche pilots to core market plumbing.

Sources

• coingape.com
• cointelegraph.com