Northern Trust has stepped up its tokenisation strategy by beginning work on custody capabilities for digital assets on the Canton Network.
The bank said the build will allow it to service tokenised instruments within a regulated framework while linking on‑chain and traditional market infrastructure.
The bank said the integration with Digital Asset’s Canton Network will allow it to develop applications that connect digital and traditional markets while maintaining the controls expected in regulated environments.
Guy Gibson, co‑president of Asset Servicing and head of Institutional Banking and Markets, said clients increasingly expect digital‑asset servicing to match established operational standards.
“As institutional adoption of digital assets progresses, clients are looking for custody and servicing models that align with established market standards and regulatory expectations,” he said. “Connecting to the Canton Network allows us to extend our asset servicing role into new market structures while maintaining the same principles of scale, control, and risk management that clients expect from Northern Trust.”
Justin Chapman, group head of strategic partnerships, digital and financial markets, said the move supports Northern Trust’s aim to unify digital and traditional asset servicing.
“Our platform is designed to integrate with our core asset servicing infrastructure to support digital and traditional assets side by side,” he said. “Leveraging these capabilities and building a custody application on the Canton Network will allow us to apply our blockchain‑agnostic, asset‑agnostic approach as markets continue to evolve.”
The development builds directly on themes Chapman outlined in an interview with Capital Pioneer in early 2025, when he argued that tokenisation’s value would extend far beyond operational efficiency. At the time, he said the industry had moved past the idea that blockchain’s primary benefit was faster settlement.
The real shift, he argued, would come from natively digital issuance, trusted data at source and the ability to embed asset‑level information directly into instruments. “The technology has to offer more,” he said then, noting that true value emerges when digital issuance enables richer data, transparency and downstream automation.
That earlier interview also highlighted Northern Trust’s belief that custodians would play a central role in connecting fragmented digital‑market infrastructure, ensuring risk management, liability frameworks and interoperability across networks. Chapman warned that secondary‑market capability remained the missing piece for widespread adoption, but said custodians were already collaborating to ensure they could operate across multiple digital and traditional ecosystems.
In this latest development, Digital Asset CEO Yuval Rooz said Northern Trust’s latest step demonstrates how traditional custodians can extend their role into digital markets. “As more real‑world assets move on‑chain, custodians play a critical role in enabling adoption within regulated markets,” he said.
