Aberdeen Investments Turns to Tokenisation to Open Its £397.5bn Private Markets Platform to Hong Kong Investors
Updated: 6 days ago
Aberdeen Investments has partnered with Finloop Finance to distribute a tokenised version of its Global Private Markets strategy to professional investors in Hong Kong, in one of the clearest signs yet that established asset managers are treating tokenisation as a distribution tool rather than a side experiment.
The deal, announced on 7 September 2026, sees Finloop Finance appointed as a distributor of Aberdeen's semi-liquid Global Private Markets strategy, with tokenised interests made available through Finloop's global wealth technology platform. The strategy spans private equity, private credit, infrastructure, real estate and natural resources, and is managed by Aberdeen's investment team. Aberdeen managed £397.5bn on behalf of clients as at 30 June 2026, including insurance companies, sovereign wealth funds, wealth managers, pension funds, platforms, banks and family offices.
The partnership is being positioned as one of the first tokenised interests in a global private markets strategy of its kind to be offered in Hong Kong, giving Finloop's client base a route into a diversified portfolio that would otherwise require a direct institutional fund relationship.
For a UK audience watching, the Aberdeen and Finloop deal is a useful reminder of what the technology is actually being used for at scale today: reducing the friction between a large, established strategy and a wealth platform's client base, rather than replacing the underlying fund structure itself. The token is the access layer. The fund, the manager and the underlying assets remain conventional.
That distinction matters for how UK platforms, consultants and law firms think about their own tokenisation roadmaps. The commercial case being proven here is not that tokenisation makes an asset manager's strategy fundamentally different, but that it makes an existing strategy reachable by investors and platforms that would previously have been excluded by geography, minimum ticket sizes or the administrative cost of onboarding a new institutional relationship.
Hong Kong's Securities and Futures Commission has been actively encouraging tokenised distribution as part of its push to keep the territory competitive as a wealth management hub, running alongside Singapore's Project Guardian initiative, which now involves more than 40 financial institutions testing tokenised bonds, deposits and funds.
The UK's own tokenisation taskforce, formed in July 2026 with participation from BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley, is working through comparable questions for wholesale UK markets, but has yet to produce a retail or professional-investor distribution deal of this profile.
Whether that changes before the end of the year will say a good deal about how quickly the UK's own asset management and wealth platform sector intends to move, at a moment when City figures are publicly warning that the UK risks ceding the initiative on tokenisation rules to other jurisdictions.
Key Takeaways
Aberdeen Investments and Finloop Finance will distribute a tokenised version of Aberdeen's £397.5bn-manager Global Private Markets strategy to professional investors in Hong Kong.
The tokenised interests span private equity, private credit, infrastructure, real estate and natural resources, distributed via Finloop's global wealth technology platform.
The deal illustrates tokenisation being used primarily to solve a distribution and access problem for existing institutional strategies, not to redesign the underlying fund.
It sits alongside Hong Kong and Singapore's active push for tokenised wealth distribution, a race in which the UK's own tokenisation taskforce has yet to produce a comparable deal.
Sources:
Aberdeen partners with Finloop to offer tokenised private markets strategy in HK, Fund Selector Asia
How the structure works
Reporting by Hubbis adds detail the headline figures leave out. The underlying vehicle is the abrdn I ICAV Global Private Markets Fund. Finloop Finance, a subsidiary of the Hong Kong wealth technology firm Finloop, holds fund units as nominee and issues the tokens on its own platform under its own regulatory permissions. Token holders do not become unitholders and have no direct rights against Aberdeen or the fund. The economics of each token are linked to the units Finloop holds.
In Hong Kong the units are offered by private placement to Professional Investors only, and the fund is not authorised by the SFC, which is why the offer stops short of the wider retail market. Of the £397.5bn Aberdeen managed at 30 June 2026, more than £77bn sat in alternative assets.
How we got here
This is not Aberdeen's first step on-chain. In June 2023 Archax tokenised an investment in abrdn's Lux Sterling money market fund, a fund of around £15bn, on the Hedera network, where abrdn sits on the governing council. That project put a liquid cash fund on a blockchain. The Finloop deal applies a similar wrapper approach to a less liquid, multi-asset private markets strategy and places it in front of an Asian wealth channel.
What it means for UK founders and platforms
The UK rulebook has moved this year. On 30 April 2026 the FCA published PS26/7, Progressing fund tokenisation, which took effect the same day. It introduces a single-stage direct to fund dealing model for all authorised funds and allows an on-chain record of unit deals to serve as the primary books and records, provided the firm has appropriate resilience plans. Units in one share class can also be recorded on more than one blockchain.
For UK wealth platforms and tokenisation startups, the Aberdeen model highlights a design choice. A nominee token, as used in Hong Kong, sits outside the fund and gives holders contractual economic exposure. A tokenised authorised fund under PS26/7 records the units themselves on-chain. The two carry different investor rights, disclosures and permissions, and founders building distribution products may want to take professional advice on which model fits their business.
Further reading
Frequently asked questions
What did Aberdeen Investments and Finloop Finance announce?
On 7 September 2026 Finloop Finance was appointed as a distributor of Aberdeen's semi-liquid Global Private Markets strategy. Tokenised interests in the strategy are made available to professional investors in Hong Kong through Finloop's global wealth technology platform.
Which assets does Aberdeen's tokenised Global Private Markets strategy cover?
The strategy spans private equity, private credit, infrastructure, real estate and natural resources, and is managed by Aberdeen's investment team. Aberdeen managed £397.5bn on behalf of clients as at 30 June 2026.
Does tokenisation change the underlying Aberdeen fund?
No. The token acts as an access layer, while the fund, the manager and the underlying assets remain conventional. Tokenisation is being used to make an existing strategy reachable by investors who would otherwise be excluded by geography, minimum ticket sizes or onboarding costs.
How does the UK compare with Hong Kong and Singapore on tokenised fund distribution?
Hong Kong's Securities and Futures Commission has been encouraging tokenised distribution, and Singapore's Project Guardian involves more than 40 financial institutions. The UK tokenisation taskforce, formed in July 2026, has yet to produce a retail or professional-investor distribution deal of this profile.
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