Articles
29 July 2026
Kshitiswar Tripathy
9 min read
Token-Ready Post-Trade: One Operations Team, Two Worlds
Managing Traditional and Tokenised Assets on a Single Platform
Winners won’t be the firms with the most digital assets. They’ll be the firms that can operate all assets through a single operational framework.
Kshitiswar Tripathy · Head of Product, NOVA CMX
The Operational Reckoning Has Arrived
Tokenised securities are no longer a pilot programme or a whitepaper aspiration. They are arriving in production environments, on regulated exchanges, and into client portfolios, and they are arriving faster than most back offices are prepared to absorb them.
The numbers are difficult to ignore. The World Economic Forum and Accenture, in a May 2025 joint study of tokenised markets, estimated post-trade cost reductions in the range of 35–65% once tokenised settlement reaches meaningful scale, depending on asset class – driven by atomic settlement eliminating counterparty risk windows, smart contracts automating corporate actions, and distributed ledgers reducing the reconciliation overhead that consumes an outsized share of operations budgets today.
Singapore is not waiting to find out. Through Project Guardian, MAS has positioned the city-state as APAC’s leading laboratory for institutional tokenisation – DBS and JPMorgan are executing live tokenised bond and deposit trades since the programme’s earliest pilots, and Standard Chartered has its own live workstreams in trade-finance tokenisation and wholesale CBDC settlement. The regulatory scaffolding is being built in real time. The question for heads of product and operations is how fast you can converge your operating model before the market moves without you.
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The Hybrid Decade Is Already Here
Let us be precise about what the next ten years will actually look like for most brokers, custodians, and asset servicers. It will not be a clean migration to a tokenised world. It will be a persistent, messy, operationally demanding hybrid state in which your team is simultaneously responsible for:
Each of these asset classes carries distinct settlement conventions, corporate action profiles, regulatory reporting obligations, and reconciliation logic. The operational complexity is not additive, it is multiplicative.
The firms that attempt to manage this complexity by spinning up a separate digital assets team, plugging in a standalone crypto platform, and patching the two worlds together with manual handoffs and spreadsheets will find themselves at a structural disadvantage. Not because the digital side will fail, but because the seams between the two worlds will become the single largest source of operational risk, client error, and cost overrun in their business.
Why Digital Assets Must Not Create Digital Silos
There is a seductive logic to organisational separation. Digital assets feel different. The technology is different. The talent profile is different. The regulatory treatment is still evolving. Building a ring-fenced team feels like prudent risk management.
It is, in practice, the opposite.
When digital assets live in a silo, you create a parallel universe of breaks. Positions that exist on-chain are invisible to your core risk systems until someone manually reconciles them. Corporate actions on tokenised instruments, coupon payments, redemptions, voting, are processed through a different workflow with different controls and different audit trails. Your client reporting engine cannot produce a unified view of holdings because it has never been designed to ingest both SWIFT messages and on-chain transaction data simultaneously.
More dangerously, a siloed model creates regulatory blind spots. Regulators in Singapore, Hong Kong, and across the EU are increasingly expecting firms to demonstrate consolidated risk management across all asset classes. A fragmented operating model is not a defensible position in a supervisory review.
The firms getting this right are not those who built the best crypto desk. They are those who extended their existing operational frameworks to accommodate digital assets as a first-class asset type, with full integration into position management, reconciliation, and reporting from day one.
The Cross-Asset Reconciliation Problem
Reconciliation is where the theoretical elegance of tokenisation collides most brutally with operational reality.
In a traditional post-trade environment, reconciliation is already widely regarded as the most labour-intensive function in operations, consuming a disproportionate share of headcount time at most mid-tier brokers and custodians, though few firms formally measure the figure. The matching of internal books against custodian records, CCP positions, and depository statements is a well-understood, if deeply imperfect, workflow.
Tokenised assets introduce several new reconciliation dimensions that break conventional tooling:
On-chain vs. off-chain position matching.
Multi-chain fragmentation.
Corporate actions in smart contracts.
Intraday settlement vs. end-of-day books.
Unified Workflow Management: What It Actually Means
“Unified platform” is a phrase that gets used loosely. It is worth being specific about what genuine unification requires, and what it does not mean.
It does not mean a single monolithic system that processes every asset class through identical logic. Tokenised assets and traditional securities have legitimately different settlement mechanics, and forcing them through the same engine is technically naive.
It does mean:
Common client reporting.
A single position management layer.
Consolidated regulatory reporting.
Unified exception management.
Future-Proofing Your Operating Model: The Three Imperatives
01
Instrument the seams before you scale.
The highest-risk moment for a hybrid operating model is not when volume is high. It is when volume is low enough that manual workarounds feel manageable, and teams accept technical debt that becomes catastrophic at scale. The time to build proper integration between your traditional and digital asset stacks is now, while transaction volumes are still forgiving of iteration.
Instrument every point where data crosses between the traditional and digital domains. Build monitoring before you need it. The firms that do this work in 2025–2026 will have an operational advantage that is genuinely difficult to replicate under competitive pressure in 2028.
02
Build for the asset class taxonomy, not the current asset class list.
Your platform architecture should be able to onboard a new instrument type, whether that is a tokenised real estate fund, a carbon credit token, or an instrument type that does not yet exist, without a bespoke integration project. The defining characteristic of a future-proof operating model is the ability to extend it to new asset classes through configuration, not custom development.
This is a product and architecture decision as much as an operations decision. Heads of product need to be asking their core platform vendors the hard questions: How long does it take to onboard a new instrument type? What does the data model look like for a hybrid traditional/tokenised structure? What is the settlement instruction framework when the same underlying asset can settle either conventionally or atomically depending on the counterparty?
03
Reskill the operations team, not just the technology team.
The talent risk in the hybrid decade is underappreciated. Operations analysts who have spent their careers in traditional post-trade will need working literacy in blockchain-based settlement, not at the developer level, but at the level of understanding finality, wallet reconciliation, and smart-contract-driven events. Conversely, digital asset specialists hired for their crypto expertise often lack the regulatory and operational discipline that institutional post-trade requires.
The firms that will execute best are those that invest in creating a genuinely cross-trained operations function, one that can handle a complex equity corporate action in the morning and a tokenised fund redemption in the afternoon, without those being seen as fundamentally different problems requiring different teams.
The Singapore Opportunity
For firms headquartered or operating in Singapore, the window to build operational leadership in this space is narrow and real.
MAS has created a genuinely supportive environment for institutional tokenisation, Project Guardian, the Variable Capital Company structure, and the progression of the Payments Services Act all point toward a jurisdiction that has made a deliberate decision to be the infrastructure hub for digital capital markets in APAC. The institutional participants are serious and the volumes, while still developing, are growing.
But the operational infrastructure is lagging. The firms that build the hybrid operating capability now, robust cross-asset reconciliation, unified exception management, consolidated reporting, will be positioned to service the tokenised asset flows that Singapore is explicitly trying to attract. The ones that wait for the market to develop before investing in operations capability will find themselves as fast followers at best, excluded at worst.
Conclusion: One Team, One Framework
The decade ahead will be defined not by which firms hold the most tokenised assets, but by which firms can manage the full spectrum of assets, traditional and tokenised, through an operations model that is coherent, scalable, and auditable.
The hybrid future is not a transition phase to be endured. It is the structural reality of institutional capital markets for the foreseeable future. The asset classes will multiply. The settlement rails will diverge further before they converge. The regulatory expectations will become more sophisticated, not less.
One operations team. One workflow framework. One position of record.
That is not a technology choice. It is a strategic one. And the firms making it deliberately today are building the operational moat that will define competitive advantage in post-trade for the next decade.
