The future of asset management is shifting on-chain, but the transition is exposing a major structural conflict over traditional corporate revenue.
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 hesitation to deploy decentralized networks. According to Johnson, major financial firms are dragging their feet because public blockchain architecture directly challenges their existing profitability.
“This technology threatens a huge number of business models that exist today in traditional finance,” Johnson stated bluntly. “If you see any kind of hesitation, it’s because there is a threat to the business model. Think about the toll-takers in a transaction.”
She explained that if a blockchain can handle settlement instantly via a smart contract, large banks can no longer collect 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 the significant transaction efficiencies. To demonstrate the cost savings, Johnson cited Franklin Templeton’s history running its tokenized money market fund, Benji, on public networks.
“It was so dramatically cheaper,” Johnson explained, breaking down the internal data. “It cost us about $1.30 a 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 is expanding its digital asset 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 through an onchain workflow.
“In everyday life, anybody—individual, medium, or large enterprise—we want to have a trusted party,” Johnson noted. “We don’t want to keep our assets in our private wallets, in our safes at home. We want to delegate this peace of mind to a third party. And that’s why custodians or banks still have a future.”
The shift of institutional wealth into digital assets will depend entirely on building standard, low-cost compliance rails for legacy investment funds. While Blockstream CEO Adam Back pointed out that bitcoin allows users to maintain true fiscal privacy without an institutional partner, Johnson concluded that standard investors will continue to demand a heavily regulated custody layer.
