Spiko and Twenty First Capital have tapped CACEIS to act as depositary and custodian of their tokenized money-market funds.
Fund administrator CACEIS reports that it is helping clients subscribe to “the first French UCITS money-market funds with units natively issued and delivered on Ethereum’s public blockchain. ” This marks the launch of CACEIS’s new custody architecture for tokenized financial instruments and crypto-assets.
“The Undertakings for the Collective Investment in Transferable Securities (UCITS) is the European Commission’s regulatory framework for managing and selling mutual funds. UCITS funds can be registered and sold in any country in the European Union using unified regulatory and investor protection requirements,” according to a definition from the Investopedia website.
The effort represents “tens of millions of euros in investments,” according to CACEIS, which adds that this fully-regulated framework will help Europe transform the “distribution and custody landscape of tokenized fund shares.”
Spiko, a French fintech company offering a blockchain-based fund unit tokenization solution, and Twenty First Capital, manager of the Spiko SICAV, “have chosen CACEIS to act as depositary and custodian of their tokenized money-market funds,” officials say.
“Custody of the investors’ units on the blockchain is performed using secure wallets that CACEIS, as custodian, makes available to clients. This tokenization of a retail money-market fund with units issued on a public blockchain is the first of its kind in Europe,” officials add.
“These first transactions validate CACEIS’ choice of technology architecture and the robustness of our digital asset custody service,” says Laurent Majchrzak, group head of digital assets at CACEIS, in a prepared statement. “We are doing everything we can to support clients during the initial stages of working with the blockchain.”
“Future developments will permit investors to pay for the subscriptions and receive the redemption proceeds directly on the blockchain with the integration of stablecoins, tokenized deposits, and over a longer horizon, digital currencies issued by central banks,” CACEIS officials add.
CACEIS is the asset servicing banking group of Crédit Agricole and Santander and has customers among asset managers, insurance companies, pension funds, banks, private equity and real estate funds, brokers and corporate clients, officials say.
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