FCA Signals Tokenisation Roadmap Focus on Interoperability and Market Integrity

The Financial Conduct Authority said it plans to publish a joint tokenisation roadmap with the Bank of England that will set out a route from today’s testing environments to established market infrastructure. In a September 22 speech published on September 23, FCA chief executive Nikhil Rathi said the regulator is focused on creating conditions for tokenisation and related technologies to scale in wholesale markets while retaining market integrity, resilience and investor protection.

Rathi pointed to feedback from more than 120 responses to the authorities’ joint vision work. Respondents highlighted opportunities to make collateral move more efficiently, while identifying settlement, prudential treatment and interoperability as obstacles. The FCA also said it intends to consult on safeguarding rules for relevant tokenised investment assets.

Why it matters

For traders, the speech is a signal about the market-structure issues regulators expect as traditional exchanges operate alongside on-chain and decentralised platforms. The FCA specifically identified liquidity, price discovery, fragmentation, resilience and oversight as questions in a potentially continuous, 24/7 market. Those issues can affect how readily a product can be traded, how prices form across venues and what protections apply when assets move between systems.

What to watch next

The roadmap and the planned safeguarding consultation are the next concrete milestones. Traders and firms should also watch for detail on interoperability, settlement arrangements and how the FCA proposes to supervise tokenised securities and derivatives as production use expands.