Christina Fienga, JPMorgan’s head of custody for Asia-Pacific, said on Sept. 2 at the FinTechOn 2026 & AFA Summit that digital assets are past the point of being just a standalone asset class. In her view, they are turning into a foundational layer of global financial infrastructure. She also said custody providers are changing too, shifting from passive safekeeping of assets to serving as a bridge between traditional markets and digital ones.
Fienga said two things stand out as the main gateways to large-scale institutional adoption of digital financial assets: the efficiency of moving tokenized collateral and interoperability across cross-border regulatory systems.
From technical viability to trust and implementation
Fienga said the worldwide debate over digital assets is no longer about whether blockchain works. That part, she suggested, is no longer the main fight. The attention now is on how trust gets built, how regulation keeps up, and how cross-market connectivity is actually made to work.
In her speech, she said digital assets now occupy a much wider role, stretching across issuance, holding, transfer, and settlement. So they are becoming infrastructure, not just a narrow product category.
No single winner in digital cash
On digital cash, Fienga rejected the winner-takes-all theory. She said the financial architecture ahead will not be ruled by a single monetary model, and that tokenized deposits, stablecoins, central bank digital currencies, and traditional fiat currencies are all likely to coexist for a long time.
But she also warned that this kind of structure creates real-world friction. If each type of digital money runs inside its own separate system, compliance costs and operational risks climb fast. Her answer was a unified control framework that works across every form of money, covering reporting, governance, and risk oversight, rather than building a different operating model for each one.
She described a problem many institutions run into in the early phase of digital asset adoption: "Each system operates independently, yet they cannot connect with one another."
Tokenized securities need more than a digital wrapper
Fienga said issuance of tokenized securities is still expanding, spanning tokenized money market funds, digital bonds, equity ETFs, and real-world assets, or RWA. But she argued that simply turning existing securities into digital form "creates almost no additional value."
According to her, real institutional value only shows up when three conditions are met at the same time:
- sufficient adoption at scale
- a clear regulatory framework
- global interoperability across the market
She added that institutional asset managers need operational consistency across both traditional and digital portfolios. Especially in custody and risk management.
Collateral mobilization stands out as a practical use case
Fienga said huge amounts of eligible collateral held by institutions are still stuck across legal entities, time zones, and legacy infrastructure. On paper, those assets may look available. In practice, their transfer speed often does not meet what the market needs.
She said tokenization can provide three main capabilities here:
- faster movement, allowing digital ownership to shift assets quickly to where they are needed
- continuous operation beyond traditional trading windows, improving response time during market volatility
- better capital efficiency by cutting the need for idle reserves and letting assets stay deployed longer while still meeting margin calls
She said tokenized money market funds extend that same logic. Uninvested digital balances can be tied to yield-bearing traditional assets, while the fund shares themselves can also be accepted as collateral. That narrows the gap between investment returns and financing costs.
Two conditions for scale: regulatory implementation and five-layer interoperability
Fienga grouped the requirements for large-scale institutional adoption into two big buckets: regulatory implementation and interoperability.
Regulatory implementation
She said regulators have widened their remit beyond early anti-money laundering, or AML, compliance. It now covers custody standards, stablecoin rules, investor protection, and cross-border governance. Regulators are also using sandbox environments with financial institutions to test workflows tied to tokenized bonds, deposits, funds, foreign exchange, and collateral.
What institutions need, she said, is a complete legal framework covering asset ownership registration, settlement finality, and cross-border protection mechanisms.
Five dimensions of interoperability
On interoperability, Fienga set out a five-part framework:
- technical interoperability: secure cross-chain communication protocols
- operational interoperability: consistent transaction processing and asset servicing across platforms
- regulatory interoperability: mutual recognition of cross-border legal rights and obligations
- liquidity interoperability: free movement of cash and asset balances across platforms
- data interoperability: unified and accurate reporting across digital and traditional holdings for investors
She said blockchain-based digital networks will not replace existing market infrastructure such as exchanges, central securities depositories, or CSDs, and clearing houses. These five dimensions, she said, are the basic conditions needed for the two systems to function together.
For custody providers, she said, the strategic shift is plain. Their core role is widening from safekeeping and protecting assets to becoming a trusted intermediary linking assets and cash, traditional infrastructure and new digital platforms, and fragmented pools of liquidity and collateral.