BNY Moves Transfer Agency Record-Keeping On-Chain, Targeting $8.6 Trillion Market

Bank of New York Mellon is migrating its transfer agency record-keeping onto blockchain, creating a single on-chain ownership ledger covering the $8.6 trillion and 7.6 million accounts it services in that business. The bank, which holds more than $59 trillion in assets under custody and administration, is positioning the move as a modernisation of the function underpinning every fund transaction rather than a replacement of existing infrastructure.

The initial cohort of clients includes Baillie Gifford, which manages more than $261 billion and will use the service for what the parties describe as the first fully native UK-regulated tokenised fund. BlackRock and BNY’s own Dreyfus money-market and cash-management unit are expected to adopt the platform for planned tokenised products. Carolyn Weinberg, BNY’s chief product and innovation officer, described the effort as bringing the books and records on-chain; Emily Portney, global head of asset servicing, acknowledged that trillions of dollars in funds will remain on traditional rails for years.

The strategic logic centres on eliminating reconciliation costs that accumulate across multiple intermediaries under the current model, replacing them with a shared ledger. BNY is not, however, treating legacy systems as immediately obsolete: the bank intends to run both in parallel, citing ongoing cyber risks including smart-contract bugs and cross-network bridge vulnerabilities as reasons for a measured transition. The broader context is a Wall Street infrastructure build-out that includes a planned shared tokenised deposit network from JPMorgan, Citi, and Bank of America, targeted for the first half of 2027.