Last August the Deutsche Börse Group announced the acquisition of Luxembourg blockchain fund distribution platform FundsDLT. Yesterday it confirmed the completion of the acquisition following approval from Luxembourg regulator CSSF.
At the time of the acquisition, Philippe Seyll, CEO of Clearstream Fund Centre spoke of the benefits of a faster time to market for asset managers and cheaper access to funds.
While the company is part of Clearstream Fund Services, it will operate independently from Clearstream in Luxembourg. That appears to be to retain its CSSF license.
Clearstream emphasized that former shareholders Credit Suisse Asset Management, UBS Asset Management and Natixis Investment Managers are still clients and are helping to evolve the solution.
Currently tokenization is proving popular in the asset management sector. The ability to reduce costs can lower minimum investment thresholds. Some types of assets, especially alternatives, were previously inaccessible to high net worth individuals, but DLT lowers the barrier to entry.
We’re only 11 days into the new year, and there have already been two announcements of tokenized fund solutions. One was Libeara, a fund tokenization platform from Standard Chartered’s SC Ventures.
The other is a fund tokenization protocol for issuing and distributing tokenized funds, Libre. Nomura is one of the indirect backers through its digital asset subsidiary Laser Digital, a Libre joint venture partner alongside WebN. Libre’s initial asset manager partners are Hamilton Lane and Brevan Howard.
