Tokenisation is an infrastructure decision

For the first time, tokenised assets in Australia sit under the same law as everything else in a wealth manager's book. The Corporations Amendment (Digital Assets Framework) Act 2026 brings the platforms that issue and hold them under the same client asset, disclosure, and custody standards long applied to brokers and fund managers, while the Reserve Bank has piloted a wholesale digital version of central bank money, a world first, with the major banks taking part. The argument has quietly moved on from whether tokenisation belongs in wealth to how quickly a firm can be ready for it.

It matters now because the client base is being remade at the very moment the rules have settled. Australia is entering its largest ever intergenerational wealth transfer, with roughly A$3.5 trillion set to pass from around five million baby boomers to a generation that grew up online and carries a comfort with digital assets the generation before it never had. For advisers and private banks, this is a retention event as much as an opportunity, because inherited assets have a long history of leaving the incumbent at the point of transfer, and the competitive question is no longer whether to tokenise, but who is licensed, custody-ready, and connected first.

The decision facing wealth managers is an infrastructure decision, and much of the industry is misreading it as a product one.

A tokenised fund is not a feature a firm adds to an existing operating model, it is a sign that the operating model itself is being rebuilt, because the instant an asset moves onchain, everything downstream of it, including custody, settlement, servicing and reporting, has to move with it or the advantage quietly evaporates. Treat tokenisation as a shelf of new products while the systems underneath stay the same, and you end up with digital assets running on analogue plumbing. Rebuild the plumbing, and you can do what your competitors cannot.

Why the infrastructure is what matters

Everything a client values sits on top of that infrastructure, and custody is where it starts, because everything else rests on it. Once a fund share, a Treasury position, or a private credit holding exists as a token, custody stops being a question answered separately for each asset class and becomes a single question asked of the entire balance sheet. Held to the same rigour as anything else in the book, custody becomes the operational backbone the whole franchise runs on.

Security is the sharp end of this, and the hard lesson of the last decade is that it is a practice rather than a setting. Most losses in digital assets do not begin with a clever exploit; they begin with a misconfigured rule or a policy nobody has reviewed in months, which means the safety of a tokenised book is only ever as good as the rules governing who can move what, and how closely those rules are watched. Too many firms leave the people responsible for security either locked out of the platform they are meant to protect or handed the full administrator access that is precisely the risk they exist to prevent, when the work demands a security function with its own visibility over policies and the authority to intervene without ever sitting in the transaction flow.

Settlement is where the economics change. A cross-border transfer that takes two days through conventional foreign exchange can settle onchain in minutes. Rebalancing and tax management - work that once required teams of operations staff - can now run as code. Together, these changes make it economical to serve clients who were previously excluded by ticket size and cost, and tailored portfolios once reserved for the private banking floor can now be offered much further down the book. Because tokenised assets inevitably spread across many networks, the firm whose controls sit above the chains can absorb a new one without starting over while the firm forced to rebuild for each will never keep pace. None of this is bought later, it is a consequence of the infrastructure a firm commits to now.

Issuance is the easy part. Distribution is where the challenge lies.

Most of the conversation still fixates on issuing the asset, when issuing a tokenised fund is the straightforward part, and the real difficulty lies in getting it to investors across jurisdictions with different licensing regimes, eligibility rules, and transfer agent relationships, which is where progress has stalled. An issuance platform with no distribution is a product with no market, and closing that gap takes two pieces of infrastructure working in concert, a distribution network the industry already trusts and a custody and settlement layer that lets a fund exist onchain and travel through that network rather than around it.

That layer already sits beneath much of the institutional market, with many of the largest banks and payment firms now running their digital asset operations on shared infrastructure rather than building it alone. Joined to a trusted distribution network, infrastructure of that kind lets a tokenised fund be issued, distributed, and settled without ever dropping back onto the old system. That is why distribution readiness has to be built in from the outset, not discovered, expensively, once the asset already exists.

The infrastructure to build the asset, hold it under the same rigour as anything else on the balance sheet, settle as fast as the token moves, and reach the next generation on the experience they expect, now exists. In Australia, the law and the infrastructure are arriving together. The only question left is which parts of the business a firm rebuilds now, before the next generation inherits and assumes it was always this way.