Mobilising tokenised collateral could strengthen demand for digital services across the wider trade lifecycle, helping move tokenisation beyond isolated use cases.
At the final discussion of the 2026 Capital Pioneer Digital Assets Summit, Anthony Clark Jones, head of digital assets (products and services) at UBS Investment Bank, identified digital collateral as one of the areas most likely to begin evolving over the next 12 months.
Clark Jones said collateral sits at the heart of investment-banking activity and argued that mobilising tokenised assets could create demand for other digital services across the transaction lifecycle.
This could help address one of the challenges that has constrained institutional tokenisation to date: individual parts of the market have often been digitalised in isolation.
Clark Jones argued that the industry needs to focus less on “interoperability”, which he described as an overused term, and more on achieving coherence across the trade lifecycle. Tokenising one part of a transaction while surrounding processes remain conventional makes it difficult for institutions to capture the full value.
The broader institutional shift
Institutions are increasingly moving from pilots towards production – although tokenisation at scale is still some way off.
Jonathan Goldowsky, co-head of Europe at Galaxy, divided the infrastructure required into three core layers: control, connectivity and application. He said investment will be needed across all three before tokenisation can operate at scale.
There are also signs that the conditions surrounding institutional adoption are changing. Stephanie Peritore, head of international sales at Fidelity Digital Assets, said technology and regulation, previously viewed as major obstacles, are increasingly being seen by institutional investors as enablers of digital-asset exposure.
Firms will nevertheless need coherent digital-asset strategies and should avoid chasing individual projects. Goldowsky noted that building institutional infrastructure can take 12–24 months, making early planning increasingly important.
Collateral could serve as an initial ‘proof point’ while helping to pull surrounding parts of the capital-markets lifecycle towards broader digital integration.
This article was written by Rhotic Media‘s James Hetherington.
