BNY Digitizes $8.6T Fund Records Onchain With Baillie Gifford and BlackRock

Woofun AI reports that BNY is migrating fund ownership records to blockchain infrastructure, a strategic pivot confirmed by the Financial Times. Carolyn Weinberg, BNY’s chief product and innovation officer, characterized the initiative as modernizing the core function behind every fund transaction by bringing books and records on-chain.

This operational shift aligns with broader digital asset expansion efforts, particularly regulatory advancements in Europe. The bank is leveraging progress under the EU’s Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) framework to position itself for the next phase of institutional blockchain adoption.

Transfer agents serve as critical financial service providers maintaining official share ownership records for investment funds. Their responsibilities include processing investor transactions, issuing and redeeming shares, updating ownership data, and facilitating communication between funds and investors.

Structurally, these records form the behind-the-scenes infrastructure enabling fund operations, yet they traditionally reside across disparate systems used by fund managers, custodians, and other market participants. This fragmentation necessitates frequent and costly reconciliation processes among stakeholders.

Woofun AI data shows BNY’s transfer agent services cover roughly $8.6 trillion in assets across 7.6 million accounts, while the firm oversees more than $59 trillion in custody and administration. Early adopters include Edinburgh, Scotland-based Baillie Gifford, which plans to use the platform for the first "fully native" United Kingdom-regulated tokenized fund, alongside BlackRock and BNY Dreyfus, which manages $261 billion in assets. Theo Golden, Baillie Gifford’s head of digital assets, emphasized that the blockchain provides a shared source of record-keeping, establishing a definitive "source of truth" for asset monitoring.

BNY has not disclosed which blockchain network will support the new platform. The company did not respond to requests for comment by the time of publication, leaving technical specifics ambiguous as the industry watches for further institutional integration.