Most financial executives have heard of tokenisation. It shows up in conversations about capital markets, stablecoins, private credit and securities settlement. It arrives wrapped in enough jargon to make people tune out. That is unfortunate, because the underlying idea isn't complicated.
Tokenisation is representation of a legally recognised claim on a financial asset as a digital token on programmable rails - in the form of smart contracts on blockchain. A bond remains a bond. A fund unit remains a fund unit. What changes is the plumbing - how ownership is recorded, transfers settle, compliance rules travel with the instrument, rather than sitting in a separate system two time zones away.
