The Institutional Tokenisation Summit Suggests the UK Is Closer Than It Looks

Earlier this week, UK Finance published a report, written by Oliver Wyman, with a blunt headline finding: Britain is behind other jurisdictions on securities tokenisation. It is a fair verdict on the scoreboard. Most of the live issuance and pilot activity to date has happened elsewhere, and the United States in particular.

After spending Tuesday at the London Blockchain Institutional Tokenisation Summit, hosted at DLA Piper, I came away with a different feeling from the one the report leaves you with. Not a contradiction of it, but a serious counterweight. In a room full of asset managers, custodians, market makers, platforms and lawyers, the mood was neither hype nor anxiety. It was practical, curious, and quietly confident. The prevailing view was that the UK's regulatory environment, and the certainty now evolving alongside it, is creating a genuinely positive space for the sector to innovate and scale. More than that, several people framed the UK not as a laggard but as a jurisdiction shaping up to be a leading place to operate from.

That gap between the paper verdict and the mood in the room is worth sitting with, because both readings are true at once.

The technology is not the problem

If there was one point of near-universal agreement across the day, it was this: the technology already does what is needed. Almost nobody in the room was arguing about whether tokenisation works. The blockers are not technical. They are regulatory, they are about compliance, and above all they are about security.

That reframing matters because it moves the conversation away from the familiar trap of admiring the technology for its own sake, and toward the harder question of whether the rules, the controls and the market conventions can catch up with what the technology can already do. By that measure, the UK's steady march toward regulatory certainty stops looking like slowness and starts looking like the actual precondition for scale. Institutions do not move on clever infrastructure. They move on certainty.

Security ran underneath every session as a constant. Not as a slide, but as a first-order concern at every layer of the stack, from custody through settlement to reporting. In institutional finance, an elegant system that cannot be trusted with other people's assets is not a system anyone will use. And if users and the ‘mainstream’ don’t use it - or benefit, then why bother!

From rewiring the plumbing to reaching the customer

Speed, efficiency and transparency are the headline benefits when tokenisation rewires the existing financial plumbing, and they are real. But the more interesting thread across the summit was a shift in where the value is expected to land.

The plumbing story is institutional. Faster settlement, tighter collateral mobility, fewer intermediaries. The session on tokenised funds, featured Theo Golden of Baillie Gifford, Brian McNulty of Lingfeng Capital and Stephen Whyman of Mole Advisory. They made the point that tokenisation has to move beyond cosmetic digital wrappers and deliver genuine operational change across administration, transfer and servicing. Tokenised cash-like and money market funds were described as an important first step toward collateral mobility and, eventually, atomic settlement.

The deeper prize sits further downstream. The consensus was that the ultimate destination is value to the end user, and mainstream adoption, even where the end user never knows that tokenisation or blockchain is involved at all. Greater automation, more direct routes to the customer, a better experience. If tokenisation succeeds, most people who benefit from it will never use the word. That is the mark of infrastructure that has actually arrived.

Interoperability is the unglamorous prerequisite

Interoperability came up again and again, and everyone in the room seemed to treat it as settled common sense rather than a debate. The logic is simple. A tokenised market only works at scale if many players, technologies, protocols and formats can connect seamlessly. Without that, every issuer builds an island and liquidity never forms. The 'Future of Trading' session, with Juan Mendieta of Keyrock, Matthias Wyss of Obligate and Satjeet Sahota of Fasanara Capital, put interoperability, collateral mobility and settlement design at the centre of what a mature tokenised market structure actually looks like.

This is the same point the UK Finance report reaches from the policy side. Shared standards and national infrastructure matter more than any single platform. The market and the regulator are, for once, converging on the same conclusion.

You no longer need to build the whole stack yourself

One of the most practical takeaways, and one founders should hear clearly, is that the era of building your own tokenisation stack from scratch is ending. The session on building the tokenised issuance stack, with speakers from Ondo, AMINA Bank, Fasanara Capital, and KAIO, laid out how issuers, administrators, legal advisers, custodians and platforms now have to work together to take a product from structuring and issuance through to service, transfer and reporting.

The message was that the sensible path is no longer to reinvent every component. It is to select the right components and the right vendors across the end-to-end lifecycle, from issuance and management through security, custody and mainstream integration, and to coordinate them well. The competitive edge is moving from who can build the most, to who can assemble and govern the right pieces with credible legal certainty.

For a founder weighing how to tokenise, that is a lower barrier and a clearer route than the market offered even a year ago.

The highlight: confidentiality as the missing piece

The standout session for me was a short, sharp presentation from Martin Halford, chief executive of Polymath, on confidential assets and the next phase of institutional tokenisation.

His argument cut against one of tokenisation's supposed virtues. We tend to celebrate total transparency as a feature. Halford's point was that full market visibility of balances, trades and counterparties is precisely what keeps large institutions away. No serious institutional participant wants its positions and counterparties legible to the entire market in real time. In regulated finance, privacy, compliance and market integrity have to operate together, not in opposition.

Confidential assets, as he framed them, offer a more institution-ready model: on-chain asset functionality combined with controlled disclosure. The right people see what they are entitled to see, when they are entitled to see it, and no more. It was a useful corrective to the reflex that more transparency is always better.

Sometimes the downside of tokenisation is too much of it.

What it means for founders and investors

For founders and investors, the read-across from an institutional summit is more direct than it first appears. The infrastructure, standards and vendor ecosystem being built for tokenised funds and bonds are the same rails that tokenised private company equity and secondary trading will eventually run on. A UK that gets regulatory certainty and interoperability right for the institutional layer makes the founder layer cheaper and faster to build on top of. You do not need to lead the institutional race to benefit from it.

For investors, the confidentiality and security threads are the ones to hold on to. The value of a tokenised holding depends on what stands behind it, who can see it, and how it settles when something goes wrong. Controlled disclosure, credible custody and a trusted settlement path are not back-office detail. They are the substance of the risk, and increasingly the substance of the opportunity.

The scoreboard says the UK is behind. The room says the UK is building the conditions to lead. On the evidence of yesterday, the second story is the one worth watching.

Key takeaways

• UK Finance's report this week found the UK behind on securities tokenisation, but the mood at the 7 July summit was practical and quietly confident that evolving UK regulatory certainty is creating space to innovate and scale.

• The strong consensus was that the technology already works. The real constraints are regulation, compliance and security, not capability.

• Efficiency and speed matter for rewiring financial plumbing, but the deeper prize is value to the end user and mainstream adoption, even where users never know tokenisation is involved.

• Interoperability was treated as an essential precondition, not a debate. Shared standards let multiple players, protocols and formats connect and liquidity form.

• Firms no longer need to build the whole stack. The sensible path is selecting the right components and vendors across issuance, management, custody, security and integration.

• The highlight, Martin Halford of Polymath on confidential assets, argued that total transparency is a structural barrier to institutional adoption, and that controlled disclosure is the more institution-ready model.

This article is general information and a first-hand editorial account. It is not investment, legal or tax advice.

Sources:

London Blockchain Institutional Tokenisation Summit, 7 July 2026, DLA Piper, London (https://londonblockchain.net/blockchain-event-series/2026-finance-summit-2/);

UK Finance, Unlocking the power of securities tokenisation, 6 July 2026 (https://www.ukfinance.org.uk/news-and-insight/blog/unlocking-power-securities-tokenisation).