As consumers we think nothing of accessing our favourite food, movie or travel destination through a transaction that takes just seconds. Almost every part of our daily lives exists in this instant, digital lane. But finance hasn’t kept up. If you want to move money between accounts, settle a trade or finalise a property transaction you’re still looking at processes that take days, not seconds. Banking apps can look slick, but the truth is the processes behind them mostly run on analogue time.
And this is true for much of modern finance: for all its seeming sophistication, the pipes underneath remain surprisingly analogue. Each transaction must pass through brokers, registries, clearing houses, and custodians before it is final. In fact, the average time for international SWIFT transactions still sits at around 18 hours. It’s a process designed around paper certificates and predictable office hours and not one for digital markets that never sleep.
That gap between our digital expectations and the existing financial reality is now impossible to ignore and it’s exactly where the next great shift in markets is unfolding. Across the industry, a new generation of market-infrastructure providers are laying the groundwork to allow digital and traditional assets to trade on the same compliant rails. Institutions are developing tokenisation infrastructure for real-world assets, and building institutional-grade digital-asset platforms, recognising that these capabilities are part of the same evolution.
For years these worlds of ‘old’ and ‘new’ money barely touched. But as regulation evolves and demand grows for faster, easier access to assets, the convergence has begun. This shift is being driven not by any single platform but by collective pressure across the ecosystem: asset managers seeking broader distribution, exchanges exploring new models of settlement, and intermediaries rethinking how to deliver speed and transparency. Traditional finance works, but it’s clunky and manual in ways consumers no longer tolerate. The direction is clear: markets are moving towards infrastructure where investors can connect once, move seamlessly across asset classes, and access both traditional and decentralised products on equal footing.
As these structural pressures build, the mechanism enabling this shift has become clearer: tokenisation – the process of turning a real-world asset into a digital token that can be traded, tracked and settled on a blockchain. In simple terms, a token becomes a digital representation of ownership: when you buy the token, you buy the asset. That shift matters because it removes layers of friction that have long slowed down financial markets. Settlement can be instantaneous. Reporting can be automated. Compliance can be built directly into code rather than checked after the fact. And assets that were once difficult to access such as private credit, commercial property, or infrastructure can be fractionalised and traded in far smaller units, expanding participation and, ultimately, enabling a more efficient allocation of capital. The new world this creates is predictable, programmable and liquid and one open to more investors.
This is not theoretical – the scale of this opportunity is immense. Boston Consulting Group estimates that as much as US$16 trillion in assets could be tokenised by 2030, up from a few hundred billion today. Some of the prime drivers in this growth are private markets, fixed income, and real-estate-backed assets. And some of the world’s largest institutions have already begun issuing tokenised funds and bonds
Tokenisation is not a fringe concept or a crypto experiment. This momentum is now being matched by regulatory action. Multiple jurisdictions, including Singapore and Switzerland, have introduced, or in the process of introducing, dedicated regulatory regimes for tokenised assets and digital securities. Regulators in the UK, EU and Hong Kong are also testing digital asset sandboxes and pilot regimes, signalling the direction of tokenised market infrastructure is moving firmly towards the mainstream. It is the next logical stage of market evolution and a way to rebuild financial infrastructure so that ownership, settlement and value transfer happen in real time, across borders, and with the level of trust and oversight regulators expect. This industry-wide shift represents a structural modernisation of the old financial plumbing – replacing slow, analogue rails with digital ones that finally match the speed of the world we live in.
If these trends continue, the impact on market structure will be profound. Looking ahead and the outlines of the 2035 financial system are already visible. Settlement will be effectively instantaneous. Markets will operate 24/7, not just during local trading hours. Investors will hold a tokenised version of almost every asset from equities and bonds to property interests, each updated in real time. Private markets will be far more accessible, with fractional ownership the norm rather than the exception. And compliance will shift from manual checks to embedded, automated verification written directly into code.
The shift is already well underway. TradFi is transforming into DeFi, not overnight, but irrevocably, and the companies that can stitch together the old and new worlds will lead the next generation of financial markets. The change won’t happen overnight. Regulation must evolve; trust must be earned; interoperability between blockchains must improve. But the direction is irreversible. Once investors experience instant settlement, transparency, and fractional access, there’s no going back to cheques, faxes and overnight clearing. Eventually – and not that far into the future – we’ll also stop calling it “crypto” or “traditional”; it will simply be digital finance, or even just ‘finance’ as we know it – governed by code, backed by regulation, and open to all.
Tokenisation won’t replace the financial system, but it will reveal what it always could have been: faster, fairer, and frictionless. And when we look back in 10 years’ time, the way we once moved money and managed markets may feel as distant as dial-up internet.
By Dan Jowett, Chief Executive Officer, Openmarkets Group
Dan will be taking part in the panel session on ‘Digital assets, stablecoins and tokenisation’, scheduled for Tuesday 19 May at the SIAA conference.