The panel opened with an honest diagnosis of how institutions are onboarding crypto: they’re not reinventing the wheel – they’re adapting what already works.
“We find that a lot of our established processes are quite fit for purpose” said Standard Chartered’s Marianne Webber. From crypto custody and stablecoin issuance to tokenized assets and CBDC pilots, the bank has scaled operations by extending existing governance structures – third-party risk management, corporate actions, product approval committees – rather than building entirely new frameworks.
That said, institutions aren’t going in blind. As BNP Paribas’s Sandip Wadje noted, geopolitical turbulence and liquidity concerns are shifting the global tone:
“Liquidity risk is high on the agenda… and we’re seeing favorable momentum on stablecoins.”
He cited U.S. Treasury figures projecting stablecoins to grow from $250 billion to $2 trillion AUM within three years.
This level of growth demands strong controls. Both banks highlighted that their baseline is traditional finance-grade risk frameworks – and then layering crypto-specific analysis on top.
But the risks of crypto go beyond just credit or market volatility – they strike at reputation, compliance, and regulatory perception.
Sandip shared an illuminating anecdote: his team at BNP Paribas was once challenged to prove that no nation-state actor could touch the ETH they were using to pay gas fees:
“I was asked to guarantee that the gas fee I pay on Ethereum would never end up with a nation-state actor. I don’t run the nodes – how can I? That’s an export‑control question at smart‑contract granularity.”
This micro-level scrutiny – where even gas fees are seen through the lens of export control – reflects the unique compliance environment banks face. As Marianne put it, reputational risk is “the same as traditional finance, but amplified.” Despite digital asset operations being less than 1% of Standard Chartered’s business, they dominate the bank’s social media mentions.
Fortunately, blockchain analytics tools have come a long way. “The analytics available now are so sophisticated” Marianne noted, adding that the progress has strengthened sanctions compliance comfort levels. Still, Sandip’s gas fee story shows there are blind spots that traditional risk teams are still grappling with.
Fernando recounted the early days of Project Guardian with SBI and JPMorgan – a milestone initiative that laid groundwork for tokenized capital markets.
“To do a single DLT transaction, we had to invent the risk framework from scratch,” he said.
No Big Four guidance, no existing templates. Every control had to be designed, reviewed by the board, and approved by regulators.
“We literally spent millions of dollars in legal fees,” he recalled. “It was probably the most expensive transaction ever.”
This set the tone: new tech is only half the job – rewriting a bank’s policies and approvals is the other half. Marianne echoed that her team encounters new risk categories each time they try to launch a product: onboarding a crypto-native market maker, for instance, required a bespoke credit risk process for an entity with no fiat balance sheet.
Now at Chainlink, Fernando is tackling the complexity head-on. His mission? Build the compliance and reporting infrastructure banks wish they had.
“We’re building a runtime environment that abstracts all these complexities,” he said. “The primitives you need to do a cross-border transaction, to issue an asset on-chain, to do a DvP transaction, while being compliant and generating all the reports that are needed across the whole life‑cycle of the token.”
For example, a Japanese investor transferring a tokenized asset to a UK counterparty may hit legal mismatches – registry requirements, ownership definitions, or securities wrappers. Chainlink is building the logic to flag and translate these in real time, as programmable compliance.
It’s not a threat to banks – it’s a support layer. Fernando argued that “banks are not competing with Google or Microsoft” and by the same logic, banks shouldn’t be competing with Chainlink either. Instead, Chainlink aims to supply the underlying “plumbing” while banks focus on the financial service.
Custody remains the cornerstone of institutional trust – and it’s also a massive internal lift.
Standard Chartered now designates named risk specialists across every risk type – from credit to reputational to Information & Cyber Security – just for digital assets. This internal muscle is what enabled them to launch services in Dubai, Singapore, and Hong Kong – where regulators were not just open, but eager.
Cloud plays a key role too. BNP Paribas discovered that by listing their blockchain partners –HSBC’s Orion on Google Cloud, AllFunds on AWS – they had accidentally become a multi-cloud bank. “The realization hadn’t sunk in,” said Sandip. “It’s a resilience risk now, especially under DORA in Europe.”
For Marianne, the most exciting trend isn’t tokenized bonds or DeFi primitives – it’s stablecoins evolving into institutional tools.
“The interest in stablecoins as a cross‑border payment method is becoming really compelling” she said. “We recently announced we will be issuing our own in Hong Kong.”
Sandip flagged growing divergence between global regulators. “The U.S. administration is taking a very favourable stance on stablecoins” said Sandip, “but the BIS just released a report this afternoon that warns of systemic risks. It’s a real policy clash.”
Still, the market is moving fast. Demand is there. And institutions – cautiously – are moving with it.
For all the talk of stablecoins and tokenization, the panellists agreed that education and operational uplift move the needle the most.
Marianne underlined it: the bank has now put 400 colleagues through Oxford’s blockchain strategy certificate and is “making sure that 86,000 people understand what we mean when we say digital assets.”
BNP Paribas takes a similar tack. Sandip sends a plain English crypto‑intel digest to 500 senior stakeholders every week – a simple habit he says has shifted executive mindsets more than any pilot or proof‑of‑concept.
But it’s not just about culture – it’s about infrastructure.
“I’m super excited about the non‑sexy, boring stuff – risk frameworks and audit templates,” Fernando said. “It's not cool, but I think its what’s really going to move the needle.”
Looking ahead, all three panellists pointed to institutional readiness as the decisive unlock:
“That’s how open‑source won,” he added. “That’s how DLT will win too.”
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