Broadridge data shows tokenization moving into core market-structure planning

Tokenization is starting to look less like an innovation lab project and more like a standing agenda item inside mainstream capital-markets planning. Broadridge’s 2026 Digital Transformation & Next-Gen Technology Study, highlighted this week after fresh industry coverage, found that 84% of surveyed financial firms now consider tokenization important to their business. For RWA markets, the headline matters, but the deeper signal matters more: institutions are increasingly preparing for a future in which blockchain-based assets are handled inside real production workflows rather than parked in separate proof-of-concept environments.

That shift is visible in the way the study frames the market. Broadridge says tokenization is moving from experimentation toward operational reality as regulation improves and real-world use cases mature. Its study materials say more than half of firms are already making meaningful investments in blockchain and distributed-ledger infrastructure in anticipation of changes to trading, clearing and settlement. Broadridge also says 55% of firms now see distributed-ledger technology as a source of capital-markets opportunity, up from 42% a year earlier, while 53% expect major changes in asset settlement, up from 44% in the prior study. Those are not the numbers of an industry treating tokenization as a side bet. They point to firms budgeting for structural change.

The architecture institutions appear to want is not a clean break from legacy finance, but a hybrid market stack. According to the same industry coverage, 92% of respondents expect digital and traditional assets to coexist for the foreseeable future, and 69% plan to integrate tokenization into existing infrastructure instead of building entirely separate blockchain-native operating environments. That fits the direction of travel across regulated finance. The strategic opportunity is not simply putting an asset onchain; it is connecting issuance, transfer, collateral, treasury and servicing functions across systems that already carry the bulk of real capital today. In other words, the likely winning model is interoperability, not institutional replacement.

That hybrid thesis is showing up in product design from major incumbents. JPMorgan’s Kinexys platform explicitly markets itself as infrastructure that can bridge legacy and public financial ecosystems with always-on programmable money movement. Its product set now includes services tied to tokenized money market funds and tokenized collateral, which is exactly the kind of operational adjacency that makes tokenization more credible inside treasury and post-trade environments. When large banks start presenting tokenized collateral and fund workflows as part of a broader production platform, the conversation shifts away from whether the technology is real and toward where it fits first in the value chain.

The assets likely to lead that transition are also becoming clearer. Broadridge’s own materials point to money market assets as an early candidate for meaningful tokenization over the next four to five years, and that lines up with where market traction has already been strongest. Ondo’s USDY product page describes the token as a freely transferable yield-bearing instrument backed by US Treasuries, available to eligible non-US individuals and institutions and accruing yield daily. Products in that category matter because they solve for a concrete institutional use case: moving idle cash or collateral into instruments that preserve familiar reserve exposure while adding blockchain-native transferability and round-the-clock utility. That is a much cleaner bridge into market adoption than tokenizing every asset class at once.

The survey also helps explain why enthusiasm has not yet translated into uniform adoption. Large firms can believe tokenization will matter and still move carefully because the hard part is operational integration, not concept validation. Rights handling, transfer restrictions, compliance controls, custody design, settlement finality and accounting treatment all have to work inside existing processes before tokenization can scale safely. That is why production is still uneven across the industry and why firms that control issuance, treasury, collateral or post-trade workflows may move faster than firms waiting for a fully mature secondary market. Institutional adoption is less likely to arrive in one dramatic jump than through a sequence of targeted workflow upgrades.

For the RWA sector, the practical takeaway is encouraging but disciplined. The market no longer needs to prove that tokenization is interesting; it needs to prove where tokenization is operationally superior. Broadridge’s data suggests the buy side, sell side and market-infrastructure layer are all moving closer to that question. The firms best positioned to benefit will be the ones that make tokenized products easy to plug into existing treasury, fund and settlement operations while preserving regulatory clarity and institutional controls. If that happens, tokenization will not break traditional market structure overnight. It will be absorbed into it, steadily and at scale, which is precisely what makes this stage of the cycle more important than the pilot-heavy years that came before.