State Street, a bank with a market capitalization of approximately $36 billion, has established itself as a bridge between traditional and digital finance, and it’s not waiting for the future to arrive.
The bank on Thursday officially launched its digital asset platform, a secure infrastructure designed to support tokenized money market funds (MMFs), exchange-traded funds (ETFs), physical products, and stablecoins. The platform includes wallet management, custodial services, and digital cash functionality and is designed to work with both public and permissioned blockchains.
Chief Executive Officer Ronald O’Hanley said during the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call on Friday that the financial system is entering a new phase of digitalization, and State Street intends to be at the center of it. He stressed that the change is not about cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. BTC$95,565.23but about restructuring traditional financial assets such as money market funds and cash. Rather, it is about incorporating them into the blockchain so that they can be moved more efficiently between new infrastructures.
“We are strategically positioning State Street to be the bridge between traditional and digital finance, and the connection point between digital asset platforms,” O’Hanley said.
One of the earliest and most practical applications of this new paradigm in finance is the tokenization of money market funds (MMFs), a product that State Street already services at scale. He said tokenized MMFs can act as collateral, enable faster settlements and provide a bridge to more digital operating models for customers.
State Street is not the only bank to recognize blockchain’s potential to transform traditional financial services. Other major banks are moving in a similar direction.
JPMorgan has been leveraging the JPM Coin and Onyx networks to settle institutional investor payments with tokenized deposits. Goldman Sachs is piloting tokenized bond issuance and building its own digital asset platform, and Citi is testing tokenized deposits and programmable payments through the Citi Token Service, all of which are laying the foundation for a financial system where traditional assets move silently on blockchain rails.
the future of finance
In parallel, the bank is also preparing future use cases that could become central to financial markets, such as settling securities using stablecoins. “As long as stablecoins become some kind of normal way of settling securities transactions, we need this kind of capability to be able to settle traditional securities transactions with that kind of cash, digital cash, so to speak,” he said.
The bank’s ambitions in the digital assets space also include a minority investment in late 2025 and a partnership with Apex Fintech Solutions. The transaction was aimed at expanding its capabilities in the wealth services market, which is of particular interest to clients seeking access to digital assets and rail.
Still, O’Hanley was clear that the economic impact of these efforts would not be felt immediately.
“It’s not going to really show up in 2026,” he said. “This is more of a medium-term issue. But all the investments we’re making now will put us in a position to be relevant in the medium term and be part of the growth story.”
That relevance, he argued, would come from infrastructure, not from speculation.
“It’s really about the digitization of transactions and enabling these institutions to transition from traditional finance to digital finance and do it in a cost-effective manner.”
