Federated Hermes (FHI), the Pittsburgh-based investment manager overseeing $911 billion in assets, plans to issue its first tokenized fund shares early next year, joining Wall Street's growing push to bring traditional investments onto blockchain rails.
The asset manager has partnered with plans to make the upcoming products available through traditional brokerages and financial advisers alongside New York-based digital securities infrastructure provider Prometheum, the companies told CoinDesk Tuesday.
The firm has not yet disclosed which funds it plans to tokenize or which blockchains they will use. Money market funds are a likely starting point, Kevin Barr, Federated Hermes' director of digital asset products and platform, told CoinDesk in an interview.
“There's enormous interest in the industry at large around tokenized money market funds, [and] it aligns very well with the ballast of our franchise, which has been our liquidity funds,” Barr said.
The move adds another major asset manager drawn to Wall Street's tokenization effort. Firms including BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, JPMorgan and, more recently, New York Life Insurance Company have embraced blockchain-based versions of traditional funds, betting the technology can modernize how assets are issued, transferred and settled. Using blockchains for investment funds could settle faster, automate recordkeeping and move more easily between financial platforms, proponents say.
Citi has projected that the tokenized securities market could balloon to $5.5 trillion by 2030.
Federated Hermes have already experimented with tokenization, and its latest effort goes beyond previous its blockchain initiatives.
The firm has worked with platforms including London-based Archax, Goldman Sachs (GS) and Singapore-based Conduit Digital to create tokenized representations of its existing investment products. Those arrangements involved third parties issuing digital versions of conventional fund holdings.
Federated Hermes now intends to issue tokenized fund share classes itself, Barr said, giving the asset manager a more direct role in bringing its products onchain. Before joining the asset manager in May, Barr spent 15 years at custody banking giant BNY, most recently as head of digital cash and innovation.
The firm's large liquidity-management business makes money market funds a natural starting point, Barr said. Such funds invest in short-term debt and serve as a place for investors to park cash while earning yield.
Tokenized money market funds and U.S. Treasuries have spearheaded Wall Street's tokenization efforts, allowing companies and institutional investors to earn yield on cash reserves while moving assets around the clock. The tokens can also serve as collateral for loans or trades, helping firms put their cash to work without selling their holdings.
"You can have instantaneous movement of those funds," Barr said. "You can have programmability of those funds in a way that is perhaps more difficult or operationally inefficient with traditional infrastructure."
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