It was announced today that Cité Gestion bank has tokenized its shares using the Taurus digital asset platform. The Swiss private bank has CHF7 billion in assets under management. While it claims to be the first private bank to tokenize its shares, it is not the first Swiss bank to do so. Credit for that goes to Sygnum, which tokenized its shares in late 2020.
“At Cité Gestion, our vision is to make it possible for our clients to take full advantage of technological progress in the capital markets, and in particular of the huge potential of rationalization and efficiency gains that the distributed ledger technology offers in this field,” said Christophe Utelli, Cité Gestion Deputy CEO. ” It was important for our bank to be among the first to take advantage of the new possibilities offered by Swiss law.”
Meanwhile, Taurus which provided the tokenization platform, said it was involved in 15 tokenizations last year, with almost half for institutional or regulated entities. The tokenization complied with standards developed by Swiss non-profit Capital Markets and Technology Association (CMTA).
“We believe 2023 will mark a step change in the industry and we are ready to support private companies to make the move,” said Sebastien Dessimoz, co-founder and managing partner of Taurus.
Switzerland has progressive laws on tokenization and has a special licensing regime for DLT trading facilities that allows direct access to retail investors and a single license for the exchange, custody and settlement. Taurus has a license from Swiss regulator FINMA to operate a digital asset exchange.
In December, Taurus partnered with three high profile Swiss banks who tested issuing tokenized structured products on the Ethereum public blockchain testnet. The banks were Credit Suisse, Pictet and Vontobel.
