The future of asset management is evolving on-chain, but the transition reveals a major structural conflict over traditional corporate revenues.
Speaking on a panel at the Proof of Talk summit in Paris, Jenny Johnson, CEO of Franklin Templeton, a $1.74 trillion asset manager, openly addressed the industry’s hesitance to deploy decentralized networks. According to Johnson, large financial companies are dragging their feet because the public blockchain architecture directly challenges their current profitability.
“This technology threatens a lot of the business models that exist today in traditional finance,” Johnson said bluntly. “If you see any hesitation, it’s because there is a threat to the business model. Think about the toll takers in a transaction.”
She explained that while a blockchain can handle settlement instantly through a smart contract, big banks can no longer charge transaction fees as third-party intermediaries.
While crypto-native networks favor open architecture, traditional financial systems are beginning to migrate to public networks due to significant transaction efficiency. To demonstrate the cost savings, Johnson cited the history of Franklin Templeton running its tokenized money market fund, Benji, on public networks.
“It was so much cheaper,” Johnson explained, breaking down the internal data. “It cost us about $1.30 per transaction for 50,000 transactions on the old system. And it cost us about $1.13 to run on the Stellar blockchain.”
Johnson’s mention of Benji comes just hours after the Wall Street giant announced it was expanding its digital assets strategy through a new partnership with MoonPay that will allow institutional investors to move between stablecoins and the asset manager’s tokenized money market fund via an on-chain workflow.
“In everyday life, we want to have someone we trust, whether it’s an individual, a medium-sized company or a large company,” Johnson noted. “We don’t want to keep our assets in our private wallets, in our safes at home. We want to delegate that peace of mind to a third party. And that’s why custodians or banks still have a future.”
The transfer of institutional wealth to digital assets will depend entirely on the establishment of standard, low-cost compliance rails for traditional investment funds. While Blockstream CEO Adam Back emphasized that Bitcoin allows users to maintain true tax privacy without an institutional partner, Johnson concluded that standard investors will continue to demand a heavily regulated custody layer.
