Digital assets are shouldering into the mainstream of financial services, no longer mere trading bets but holding the potential to revolutionise capital markets themselves.
The Big Four can’t sit this one out, and nor should they want to. Their clients are asking how to integrate tokenised assets with legacy stacks, what embracing these technologies means for their balance sheets and tax positions, and which firms they can trust as partners in defining their digital asset strategies.
At the same time, crypto-native boutiques have spent the last decade or more staking out territory in many of the same areas. If the large consultancies want to stay relevant, they need to make their voices heard.
Regulatory clarity – or at least a working version of it – is finally emerging in the major markets, with regulatory frameworks for digital assets converging even if the details still vary by jurisdiction. That makes 2026 a pivotal year for enterprise adoption: the point where experimentation is expected to graduate into live, regulated products.
This is the first part of Capital Pioneer’s deep dive into the Big Four’s digital asset strategies. We start with PwC and EY – two firms that have decided 2026 is the year to scale. KPMG and Deloitte will have their own moment in part two.
At a glance
Digital asset heritage
- EY has been on what Amarjit Singh calls a 10-year blockchain journey, building out tools and public-chain solutions ahead of many competitors
- PwC is treating 2026 as the “crypto renaissance” per James Moseley, as regulatory frameworks harden and client demand surges
Core propositions
- EY is leaning into tokenisation and assurance: blockchain analysers, smart-contract review and control uplift for both crypto-native and traditional institutions
- PwC is positioning itself at the convergence of traditional and crypto-native finance: helping legacy firms knit new solutions into existing operational models, and fintechs build mature operating models around their cultures of disruption
How they talk about 2026
- For EY, 2026 is about getting ecosystems and regulators comfortable enough that tokenisation can move from a lofty concept to granular solutions
- For PwC, 2026 is “the year of scaling” – getting solutions out of sandboxes and into production, with a balance between prudence and innovation
EY: Playing the long game
EY stepped into the digital asset world with the founding of its Global Blockchain Team a decade ago. “That global team has been quite useful in making sure that we kept our eye on the market,” says Amarjit Singh, EMEIA Assurance Blockchain Leader at EY.
The firm built its digital asset business on public blockchains, using the technology for solutions as wide-ranging as blood tracing, news verification and wine production – and Singh is clear that their capabilities has moved far beyond such quirky endeavours.
“It’s now going on in the financial services arena as well,” he tells Capital Pioneer. “We very much see that blockchain has the ability to be the future rails of financial services.”
EY’s 2026 play splits into two broad lanes, both of which are long-standing areas of interest for the firm:
- Bringing trust to trading ecosystems
EY works with firms on both sides of crypto trading, focused on control environments and consumer outcomes – for instance, making sure exchanges, brokers and platforms have appropriate governance, anti-money laundering and know your customer systems. Many digital asset-native firms have scaled faster than their risk frameworks; EY is in the business of helping them catch up.
“We want to bring trust and help firms provide the best that they can to their customers, and likewise help investors get the best that they can from those firms,” Singh says.
2. Designing tokenisation strategies
The second lane is tokenisation. EY is working with banks, asset managers and market infrastructure providers on strategy, readiness and product design. That includes supporting regulators that are looking to, in Singh’s words, “get comfortable in this space” as appetite builds.
“We’re firmly of the view that we need to get the ecosystem working. We need to get all the parties there,” he adds.
The toolkit
Under the hood, EY is trying to industrialise this work. Its Blockchain Analyzer suite – including the Reconciler and Smart Contract & Token Review tools – is designed to crunch on-chain data, analyse positions and flag anomalies. In 2025, EY added AI capabilities that let users interrogate smart contracts in natural language, promising to speed up vulnerability detection and review.
These are combined with OpsChain traceability tools and token review engines that allow clients to treat on-chain activity as just another auditable data source, rather than something exotic and separate. The direction of travel is clear: tokenised assets should be as risk managed as any other line item.
Regulation without borders
Where EY sounds most animated is on the regulatory detail.
“This market is borderless,” Singh says. “From a public interest perspective, it’s important for us to feed into the discussions and debates that happen in markets, helping regulators and legislators get a better understanding of the risks and issues, and helping them calibrate those across the region.”
The industry conversation has shifted from vague enthusiasm (“tokenisation is really good,” Singh jokes) to practical questions that sit squarely within EY’s expertise:
- What is the legal standing of a token?
- What do you actually own?
- How do you treat tokenised positions in insolvency?
- What’s the tax treatment, and how does it appear on the balance sheet?
“If we don’t get the tax and accounting points right, everything will screech to a halt,” Singh warns. “That’s where the conversation is now going.”
This dovetails with EY’s wider regulatory outlook for digital assets, which argues that global regulation must move towards interconnectivity to unlock the full benefits of a materially tokenised economy.
“Think about global financial services: whether you’re trading in Singapore, Hong Kong, Luxembourg, France, the UK, it generally looks the same. We need to ensure that we don’t create lots of little silos, which will mean we don’t have market depth, liquidity, buy-in,” Singh says.
“That’s why, wherever possible, EY has been nudging for principles-based regulation. The market is moving very fast; the technology is moving very fast. We don’t want to be constantly re-regulating every new technology.”
And in classic assurance-firm fashion, EY is candid about its own incentives. Compared with both crypto-native boutiques and newer large entrants to the market, Singh says: “We can’t stand still. We have to keep innovating, winning work, showing our value to clients. We are definitely not resting on our laurels.”
PwC: From pilot to product
“2025 was something of a crypto renaissance,” says James Moseley, UK Digital Assets Lead at PwC. With a change of administration in the US and long-awaited regulatory momentum in the UK, he argues, “we saw a renewed focus on digital assets.”
Much of that year, in Moseley’s telling, was spent on foundations: engaging with companies that were “putting their feet in the water” and piloting use-cases “amid the evolving regulatory framework”. That groundwork, he says, “has set us the industry up for 2026, which I see as the year of scaling – the year we’re going to see prototypes grow into scaled implementations, in a responsible and risk-managed way.”
PwC’s client book in this space is split between:
- Traditional financial institutions wrestling with how to plug tokenised products into legacy stacks without disrupting how they make money today; and
- Fintechs and crypto-native businesses that have scaled quickly on the back of strong technology and product instincts, but now need to retrofit institutional-grade governance and risk management.
“There’s a lot of value in being that bridge between the tech startups and the TradFi players,” Moseley says. The firm pitches its depth in regulation, tax and assurance as the connective tissue that lets both sides move towards “a new digitised world”, without losing sight of what has made them successful thus far.
No single winner
Moseley is clear that 2026 will not include a monolithic bet on any single form of digital money. “We’re going to see an ecosystem evolve where stablecoins, tokenised deposits and central bank digital currencies coexist,” he says, “and we need to help our clients build optionality around how they embed those in their products.”
The strategic direction is backed by hard investment. Early 2026 saw PwC announce an aggressive expansion of its digital asset practice, with US CEO Paul Griggs saying the firm was “leaning in” to crypto-related work now that digital-asset legislation provides a clearer framework.
“We are looking globally at how we build our already strong capabilities further,” says Moseley of that expansion. “We’ll be looking to continually invest in talent, upskilling, bringing ideas to market and helping build the ecosystem and supporting tech that helps us deliver effectively.”
Competing with crypto-natives – and everyone else
Moseley is realistic about the competitive landscape. On the one hand, there are specialised boutiques and law firms that are “incredibly good at their jobs” in narrow slices of authorisation, compliance or protocol security. On the other, the other large strategy houses are all polishing their own tokenisation narratives.
PwC’s differentiation rests heavily on its audit and tax brand. The firm has spent time “thinking beyond the technical engineering and the process of tokenisation, and into how you risk-manage it”, Moseley says, citing examples including embedded credit risk on decentralised settlement networks, re-tooled trading-desk supervision and custody audit practices.
Against the crypto-natives, the approach is not simply competition. “We fit into an ecosystem with them and others – particularly the law firms,” he says. “We are aware of the competition, but we’re also looking at how we cooperate and co-exist, fitting into different parts of the value chain.”
Moseley’s test for success by the end of 2026 is strikingly infrastructure-centric. He wants to see solutions “out of the sandboxes,” with scaled, interoperable digital-money rails that users can adopt and treasuries can push volume through – setting the UK market on a credible path towards “a materially tokenised world in the next 10 years.”
Meeting in the middle
If there’s a through-line across both firms, it’s the convergence between the traditional finance and digital asset worlds – a meeting in the middle where either side embraces the strengths of the other.
On one side, established financial institutions are trying to innovate without breaking what already works. As Moseley puts it, many are running “big, complex infrastructures and processes” and need to knit tokenised products into that architecture “in a way that doesn’t disrupt how they make money today but gives them the strategic flexibility to innovate ahead of the market tomorrow.”
On the other side, crypto-native firms are maturing quickly. Singh describes a wave of work focused on custody and controls, particularly for fintechs that have scaled at speed. “They’ve grown very quickly, and their control environments haven’t always kept up,” he says. Firms eyeing IPOs or other fundraising need to show they are “ready to play with the big guys”, with operations fit for institutional capital.
Crucially, neither camp is simply copying the other. Moseley talks about helping startups mature “without losing their innovation culture and the agility that made them successful”, while Singh describes compelling traditional finance clients to “look at the delta” – the new technologies that aren’t yet on their radar.
That middle ground is where large consultancies can thrive: seeing the whole landscape when individual players are still focused on their own corner of it.
