Franklin Templeton Bets Blockchain Will Transform Asset Management

The payments and asset management industries are undergoing a fundamental reset. A report from McKinsey published last this summer finds that stablecoins and tokenized cash are emerging as serious challengers to incumbent infrastructure, with transaction volumes forecast to reach as much as $250 billion per day within three years. That inflection point is forcing banks, asset managers, and technology providers to move quickly or risk irrelevance.
Few incumbents are leaning in as aggressively as Franklin Templeton. The firm’s head of digital assets, Roger Bayston, says blockchain technology is not a side project but a new foundation for how securities, funds, and collateral will be issued, traded, and managed.
Roger Bayston, Head of Digital Assets at Franklin Templeton
From Research to Deployment
Bayston recalls that Franklin Templeton’s early work in the space was pure R&D. The question was basic: What could distributed ledgers do for an asset manager? The answer was equally basic at first, eliminate costly reconciliations and duplicative ledgers that plague capital markets. But once the regulatory picture began to shift in the U.S. earlier this year, the firm moved from exploration to commercialization.
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“The biggest challenge we faced for years was the regulatory construct,” Bayston said. “That changed dramatically after the first of the year. Now it’s about focus, delivery, and scaling what we’ve incubated into real products.”
Benji: A Tokenized Money Market Fund
Franklin Templeton’s showcase product is Benji, the blockchain-enabled representation of its U.S. Government Money Fund. Instead of holding shares in a brokerage account, investors hold a token in a digital wallet. Transfers are nearly instantaneous, and the fund pays intraday yield calculated down to the second, a feature impossible in legacy systems.
While the concept may sound niche, demand is growing. Early adopters include crypto-native firms and exchanges looking for a yield-bearing alternative to stablecoins in collateral management. Bayston noted that these clients want to post collateral that earns income, not sit idle. In practice, that means Benji can slot into derivatives and lending markets where stablecoins dominate today.
McKinsey’s report highlights exactly this convergence. Yield-bearing, tokenized cash equivalents are becoming popular complements to traditional stablecoins, with Franklin Templeton, BlackRock, and Ondo among the early movers.
Beyond Collateral: Expanding the Universe of Assets
For Bayston, tokenization is not just about faster money funds. It is about transforming what investors can own, “We’ve updated transfer agency infrastructure with blockchain,” he said. “Now, previously illiquid or non-fungible assets, from private funds to fractional ownership of a sports team, can potentially be wrapped into a client portfolio alongside traditional securities.”
Natalya Thakur, is CEO of Knova which provides the API infrastructure layer that unifies traditional and tokenized assets, helping institutions manage, automate, and transact across all asset types in real time and she commented,
“Franklin Templeton’s launch of Benji shows how tokenization is making even the most traditional products, like government money funds, more dynamic and interoperable. Institutions are seeking to integrate tokenized and traditional assets into a single operational stack, where yields can be optimized and collateral can move instantly. Tokenized funds like Benji will thrive when paired with infrastructure that lets firms orchestrate them side-by-side with securities, stablecoins, and deposits.”
That idea echoes McKinsey’s thesis that tokenized money, deposits, and securities could reshape capital markets, treasury operations, and even cross-border remittances. The implications extend beyond cost savings to entirely new product categories and customer segments.
Global Ambition, Local Regulation
Franklin Templeton has already launched multiple versions of Benji, including U.S. and European Union structures. Early traction is strongest in crypto-native markets where the instrument is used as collateral, but Bayston envisions adoption in public markets as regulations catch up.
He points to recent developments like the EU’s Markets in Crypto-Assets regulation and the U.S. GENIUS Act as accelerants. With clearer rules, tokenized funds can coexist with, or even displace, stablecoins in mainstream financial plumbing.
The Next 12 Months
Bayston avoids bold five-year predictions, but he is confident about the near term. Franklin Templeton has built a tokenization platform across public and private funds. The next step is deploying it widely across its asset management businesses.
“We know the wallet ecosystems have hundreds of millions of customers we don’t touch today,” Bayston said. “Meeting their needs is a tremendous opportunity for us.”
The McKinsey report argues that 2025 could be the year stablecoins and tokenized assets cross into the financial mainstream. For Franklin Templeton, the shift is already underway. By blending plain-vanilla money funds with blockchain rails, the firm is proving that tokenization is not just a theory but a functioning business model.
If other incumbents hesitate, they may find themselves disrupted not by fintechs but by peers willing to rewire their infrastructure for the digital era.