The Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation began limited production trades of tokenised Russell 1000 stocks, exchange traded funds and US Treasuries this week, moving the world's largest securities depository from pilot planning into live settlement on blockchain rails for the first time.

Structured products are a mainstay of Asian wealth portfolios, and HSBC is one of the region's largest issuers of them. That makes the efficiency case unusually strong. Popular products such as autocallables and equity linked notes have busy lifecycles, with observation dates, coupon triggers and early redemption events that are currently tracked and reconciled separately by the issuer, paying agents and distributors. A digitally native note makes the token itself the single

For anyone building in tokenisation in Britain, the hard question has never been whether the technology works. It is whether the UK will be a place worth building it in. A new report from UK Finance, the industry body for the country's banking and finance sector, offers an uncomfortable but useful a

The most important developments in tokenisation are rarely the loud ones. They tend to happen in the settlement layer, the part of finance almost nobody outside the back office ever thinks about, and they decide whether an idea that works in a pilot can survive contact with real institutional money.

Settlement is the least glamorous word in finance and quite possibly the most important. It is the moment a trade actually completes, when cash and asset change hands and the deal becomes real. For decades that moment has taken days, propped up by a chain of intermediaries each taking a cut and addi