The Wealth Manager's Kodak Moment

Why tokenisation isn't coming for Dutch wealth managers — it's already here. And the window to lead rather than follow is closing faster than most boards realise.

A familiar story, accelerated

In 1993, a Kodak executive was asked about digital photography. His response was measured and reasonable: the technology was interesting, but film quality was superior, customers weren't asking for it, and the economics didn't make sense yet. He was right on every point. Within fifteen years, Kodak filed for bankruptcy.

The pattern repeats with remarkable consistency. Blockbuster's CEO dismissed Netflix in 2005 because rental stores still generated billions in revenue. Nokia's board saw the iPhone as a niche gadget for tech enthusiasts. In each case, the incumbents weren't stupid. They were rational. They looked at their current clients, their current revenue, and their current competitive position — and concluded that the disruption wasn't urgent enough to act on.

The disruption they missed wasn't a product. It was an infrastructure shift. Film to digital. Physical retail to streaming. Hardware to platform. Once the new infrastructure matured, the transition happened not in decades but in quarters.

Tokenisation is not a product innovation. It is an infrastructure shift. And infrastructure shifts don't politely wait for incumbents to finish their strategic review.

What's actually happening right now

Let's set aside the hype and look at what the largest, most conservative financial institutions in the world are doing — not saying, doing.

BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager, has built a $2.8 billion tokenised money market fund (BUIDL) and integrated it into decentralised trading infrastructure. This is not a pilot. It is a live, revenue-generating product operating at institutional scale, processing real capital in real time.

The London Stock Exchange Group has launched its Digital Settlement House with eleven of the world's largest banks — including JPMorgan, Citi, BNP Paribas, Deutsche Bank, and UBS — collectively investing in a 20% stake. They are building the settlement infrastructure for tokenised securities using commercial bank money. Not a proof of concept. Live infrastructure.

State Street, with $51.7 trillion in assets under custody, has launched its Digital Asset Platform in partnership with Taurus to support tokenised investment vehicles, digital cash solutions, and stablecoin infrastructure.

ICE and CME — the operators of the New York Stock Exchange and the world's largest derivatives exchange — are racing to build 24/7 tokenised securities platforms. CME is developing its own proprietary digital cash instrument for clearing and collateral. These are not experiments. They are strategic bets on the next generation of market infrastructure.

BNY Mellon, the world's largest custodian at $57.8 trillion, has gone live with tokenised deposits for collateral and margin workflows, with Citadel Securities, ICE, and Circle as early adopters.

Swift has completed live trials of tokenised bond settlement across blockchain and traditional systems with BNP Paribas, Intesa Sanpaolo, and Société Générale — proving cross-platform interoperability works at scale.

Read that list again. This is not a collection of fintech startups. It is the institutional backbone of global finance — exchanges, custodians, clearinghouses, settlement infrastructure — collectively rebuilding the system on which your business depends.

Across the Atlantic: the regulatory accelerator

While Europe has been methodical with MiCAR and national frameworks, the United States has shifted from cautious observation to active construction.

The SEC has published a formal taxonomy for tokenised securities, moving from the question of whether these assets are legal to defining exactly how they must be structured. The GENIUS Act is creating a regulated framework for stablecoins as reserve vehicles. Franklin Templeton is aligning its tokenised fund products with this new regulatory architecture, positioning them as institutional collateral on platforms like Binance.

The significance for Dutch wealth managers is not the American regulatory detail. It is the speed. The world's largest capital market is no longer debating whether tokenisation fits within existing law — it is building the legal infrastructure to scale it. When US regulatory clarity combines with US institutional capital and US technology platforms, the resulting infrastructure becomes the global default.

European wealth managers who wait for their own regulatory moment of perfect clarity risk discovering that the infrastructure has already been built elsewhere — and they are paying rent on rails they didn't help design.

What this means for Dutch wealth managers

If you manage assets in the Netherlands, you operate within one of Europe's most well-regulated, well-respected financial ecosystems. The AFM is thorough. Your compliance frameworks are robust. Your client relationships are built on decades of trust. None of that is threatened by tokenisation.

What is threatened is your position in the value chain.

The institutions listed above are not building parallel systems that sit alongside traditional finance. They are building replacement infrastructure. Settlement that happens in seconds rather than days. Collateral that moves across borders and asset classes without manual reconciliation. Fund products that are natively digital, programmable, and interoperable from the moment they are created.

When this infrastructure matures — and the timelines are now measured in quarters, not years — the question will not be whether your firm can offer tokenised products. It will be whether your firm can still access the underlying infrastructure at competitive terms.

Think of it like the shift from trading floors to electronic trading in the early 2000s. The firms that built or adopted electronic infrastructure early gained permanent structural advantages in cost, speed, and scale. The firms that waited found themselves dependent on platforms they didn't build, paying fees they couldn't negotiate, operating at speeds they couldn't match.

The real risk is not acting too early

Every conversation we have with wealth management boards surfaces the same objections. Our clients aren't asking for it. The regulation isn't clear enough yet. We don't see the business case. We'll get to it when the timing is right.

These are the same objections, nearly word for word, that Kodak's board made about digital photography. That Blockbuster's management made about streaming. That Nokia's leadership made about smartphones. And in each case, they were right about the present and catastrophically wrong about the speed of the transition.

Your clients aren't asking for tokenisation because they don't know what it is yet. But the next generation of high-net-worth individuals — the thirty- and forty-year-olds inheriting wealth or building it in tech-adjacent industries — will expect digital-native financial products as a baseline, not a novelty. When they look for a wealth manager, they won't choose the one still explaining why their settlement takes two days.

The regulation is moving. MiCAR is live. The eWpG in Germany has created a legal framework for electronic securities. The SEC is building a taxonomy. The question is no longer whether regulators will allow tokenised products — it is which jurisdictional framework your firm will be ready to operate under when the moment arrives.

The business case builds as you move. Tradeweb, an electronic trading platform, booked a $271 million gain from its early positioning on the Canton Network. That is not theoretical future value. That is current-year profit from infrastructure positioning. The firms that move first capture disproportionate value — not from speculating on digital assets, but from positioning themselves in the new settlement and collateral infrastructure.

This is not about digital currency

Let's be direct about this, because it matters for how boards think about the opportunity. Tokenisation is not about Bitcoin, Ethereum, or speculative digital assets. It is about representing traditional, regulated financial instruments — bonds, fund shares, structured products, deposits — on digital infrastructure that is faster, more transparent, and more efficient than the systems we use today.

When BlackRock tokenises a money market fund, it is still a money market fund. It still invests in US Treasuries. It still has a prospectus, a custodian, and regulatory oversight. The difference is that the operational infrastructure around it — how it settles, how it moves between counterparties, how it functions as collateral — becomes dramatically more efficient.

This distinction matters because it reframes the conversation from' should we get into digital assets?' (which is the wrong question) to' when and how do we upgrade our infrastructure?' (which is the right question).

The firms that thrive in the next decade will not be the ones that' adopted blockchain.' They will be the ones that understood, early enough, that the infrastructure of asset management was changing — and positioned themselves on the right side of the transition.

What we advise our clients

We work with Dutch wealth managers and asset managers who see the shift coming and want to navigate it with rigour rather than rush. Our approach is not to sell tokenisation as a product. It is to help firms understand their options, evaluate the infrastructure landscape independently, and make structured decisions that fit their specific products, jurisdiction, and client base.

Based on the engagements we have completed, here is what we tell management teams:

Start with analysis, not implementation. Map your product portfolio against the tokenisation routes available in your jurisdiction. Understand which products can be tokenised under current regulation, which require wrapper structures, and which are premature. Not every product should be tokenised, and not every route is feasible. A structured feasibility analysis gives your board a decision framework rather than an opinion.

Build regulatory fluency now. MiCAR, AIFMD, the Dutch implementation of European frameworks — these are evolving. Your compliance and legal teams need to understand the tokenisation-relevant provisions before you need to apply them. Pre-engagement with the AFM, even informally, reduces uncertainty dramatically.

Evaluate partners independently. The tokenisation infrastructure landscape is crowded and opaque. Custodians, platforms, CSDs, and technology providers all claim to offer end-to-end solutions. Most don't. A structured, vendor-independent evaluation — an RFI process that asks the right questions — protects your firm from expensive mistakes and ensures you select infrastructure that actually fits your needs.

Think in phases, not big bangs. The firms succeeding with tokenisation are not launching everything at once. They are running structured pilots: a single product, a controlled scope, a clear set of validation questions. A well-designed pilot gives you institutional learning and a concrete basis for the next investment decision.

The window

The analogy we return to most often is not Kodak, though it is useful. It is the transition from analogue to electronic trading. That transition created a window — perhaps five to seven years — during which firms could build or join the new infrastructure on favourable terms. Early movers became foundational. Late movers became tenants.

We believe the tokenisation window is shorter. The pace of institutional adoption in 2024 and 2025 has been faster than any credible forecast predicted. The infrastructure being built by BlackRock, LSEG, State Street, BNY Mellon, CME, and ICE is not theoretical — it is operational. When these systems reach full maturity, the terms of participation will be set by those who helped build them.

Dutch wealth managers have a genuine advantage: a strong regulatory foundation, deep client relationships, and a tradition of prudent innovation. Those are exactly the strengths that position a firm to navigate this transition well — if the transition is navigated deliberately rather than deferred indefinitely.

The question is no longer whether tokenisation will affect your business. It is whether you will be positioned to benefit from it or scrambling to catch up.