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The UK’s home for tokenised equity. Independent news, insight and resources for founders raising capital, investors deploying it, and the firms supporting both — as the regulation, infrastructure and opportunity converge.

Oliver Wyman Puts a 45 Billion Dollar Price Tag on the Financial Market Infrastructure Revenue Tokenisation Could Move Onto New Rails

Writer: Shawn Jhanji
Shawn Jhanji
3 days ago
3 min read
Hiten Patel, Oliver Wyman's global head of financial infrastructure, technology and services, has put a specific number on a question that UK tokenisation platforms, custodians and investors keep asking in vaguer terms: how much of today's financial market infrastructure revenue is actually at stake. Speaking to The Fintech Times, Patel separated two figures that he says are routinely collapsed into a single headline. The first is 45 billion dollars, his estimate of existing financial market infrastructure revenue, the fees earned today from settlement, custody, collateral management and related services, that could migrate onto tokenised, token native rails as the technology matures. The second is 25 billion dollars, a distinct estimate of gross new revenue that tokenisation could create outright, through products and services that are not possible on legacy rails at all. Treating these as one number, Patel argues, overstates the near term opportunity and confuses two very different investment cases. Migrating revenue is a fight over who captures fees that already exist. New revenue is a genuine expansion of the market. Oliver Wyman's broader model suggests tokenisation could move as much as 35 per cent of today's financial market infrastructure revenue, roughly that 45 billion dollar figure, onto token native infrastructure over time. It expects tokenisation to structurally eliminate a further 5 per cent, around 7 billion dollars, as intermediation costs that currently justify certain fees simply disappear once settlement and reconciliation happen on shared ledgers. The remaining 60 per cent, Patel suggests, stays on legacy rails for the foreseeable future, at least until token native infrastructure proves itself at scale in the asset classes that matter most to institutional balance sheets. For founders and investors building in this space, the distinction is practically useful. A business aiming to capture migrating revenue is competing against incumbent custodians, central securities depositories and exchanges for fees that already exist, a battle likely to be won on regulatory access, integration depth and trust rather than pure technology. A business aiming at the new revenue pool is instead trying to prove a product category that does not yet exist in the traditional world, a harder sell but a larger prize if it works. The analysis lands at a useful moment for UK market infrastructure. The Bank of England and the FCA's joint vision for tokenisation in UK wholesale markets, the ongoing Digital Securities Sandbox, PISCES and HM Treasury's digital gilt pilot are all, in effect, building the regulatory plumbing that would let exactly this kind of revenue migration happen inside UK markets rather than offshore. Oliver Wyman's numbers give the platforms, law firms and consultants advising on this build out a concrete size of prize to plan against, rather than the broad, often incomparable, trillion dollar tokenisation forecasts that circulate in crypto research.

Hiten Patel, Oliver Wyman's global head of financial infrastructure, technology and services, has put a specific number on a question that UK tokenisation platforms, custodians and investors keep asking in vaguer terms: how much of today's financial market infrastructure revenue is actually at stake.


Speaking to The Fintech Times, Patel separated two figures that he says are routinely collapsed into a single headline. The first is 45 billion dollars, his estimate of existing financial market infrastructure revenue, the fees earned today from settlement, custody, collateral management and related services, that could migrate onto tokenised, token native rails as the technology matures. The second is 25 billion dollars, a distinct estimate of gross new revenue that tokenisation could create outright, through products and services that are not possible on legacy rails at all.


Treating these as one number, Patel argues, overstates the near term opportunity and confuses two very different investment cases. Migrating revenue is a fight over who captures fees that already exist. New revenue is a genuine expansion of the market.

Oliver Wyman's broader model suggests tokenisation could move as much as 35 per cent of today's financial market infrastructure revenue, roughly that 45 billion dollar figure, onto token native infrastructure over time.


It expects tokenisation to structurally eliminate a further 5 per cent, around 7 billion dollars, as intermediation costs that currently justify certain fees simply disappear once settlement and reconciliation happen on shared ledgers. The remaining 60 per cent, Patel suggests, stays on legacy rails for the foreseeable future, at least until token native infrastructure proves itself at scale in the asset classes that matter most to institutional balance sheets.


For founders and investors building in this space, the distinction is practically useful. A business aiming to capture migrating revenue is competing against incumbent custodians, central securities depositories and exchanges for fees that already exist, a battle likely to be won on regulatory access, integration depth and trust rather than pure technology. A business aiming at the new revenue pool is instead trying to prove a product category that does not yet exist in the traditional world, a harder sell but a larger prize if it works.


The analysis lands at a useful moment for UK market infrastructure. The Bank of England and the FCA's joint vision for tokenisation in UK wholesale markets, the ongoing Digital Securities Sandbox, PISCES and HM Treasury's digital gilt pilot are all, in effect, building the regulatory plumbing that would let exactly this kind of revenue migration happen inside UK markets rather than offshore. Oliver Wyman's numbers give the platforms, law firms and consultants advising on this build out a concrete size of prize to plan against, rather than the broad, often incomparable, trillion dollar tokenisation forecasts that circulate in crypto research.


They are also a useful corrective for founders pitching tokenisation infrastructure to investors. A pitch that can specify whether it is chasing migrating fees or new revenue, and can size that opportunity against Oliver Wyman's framework, is likely to land better with institutional backers than one relying on total addressable market figures pulled from generic RWA market reports.


Key Takeaways

  • Oliver Wyman estimates 45 billion dollars of existing financial market infrastructure revenue could migrate onto tokenised rails, a distinct figure from the 25 billion dollars of gross new revenue it separately estimates tokenisation could create.

  • The firm's model expects roughly 35 per cent of financial market infrastructure revenue to migrate onto token native rails, a further 5 per cent to be eliminated as intermediation costs disappear, and around 60 per cent to remain on legacy infrastructure for now.

  • The framework gives UK tokenisation platforms, custodians and law firms a clearer size of prize than typical broad market forecasts, and distinguishes between competing for existing fees and building genuinely new products.

  • It arrives as the Bank of England, FCA and HM Treasury continue building the regulatory infrastructure, the Digital Securities Sandbox, PISCES and the digital gilt pilot, that would let this revenue migration happen inside UK markets.


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