One of finance’s most stubborn problems comes down to access: who gets through the door in the first place, and why so little has changed.
Retail investors have long been shut out of some of the most reliable sources of returns in finance. Trade finance, private credit, and institutional fixed income move trillions of dollars annually but access has been restricted to banks and large institutions. Steven Hu, head of digital assets at OCBC Bank, thinks that is about to change and that the mechanism is already being tested.
“Digital assets are not a fad; they are a permanent part of financial services. The question was never about whether this technology is interesting. It is how the bank, as a regulated institution, could leverage our institutional grade of trust, governance, risk management and investor protection to allow more features to be packed into our financial products,” says Hu at the Investing with Greater Clarity in a Fragmented World, an OCBC Securities forum held on May 16.
Tokenisation converts the legal rights to an asset into a digital token that can be held, transferred and traded without the layers of intermediaries that make conventional investing slow and expensive. Subscribe to a fund on a Friday, and confirmation may not arrive until Monday. Settlement cycles can quietly eat into returns and flexibility. These are not failures of the system but part of how conventional finance works.
OCBC has already run a pilot tokenised bespoke bond. Investors could exit the same day without opening a separate custody account, shortening a process that typically takes days. Hu applies the same logic to money market funds. A tokenised version could let a treasurer put cash to work in the morning, earn yield through the day and redeem it by the afternoon. “You will start accruing yield on the same day, and if you feel like doing something else, you can access the position quickly, enjoying the benefits of interest for those couple of hours. The impact is profound,” he says.
The more consequential shift is in what gets tokenised next. Hu points to trade finance, the short-dated debt underpinning global commerce, as one example, noting that most of it sits on bank balance sheets. He describes it as an asset class with strong risk-adjusted returns that remains out of reach for most investors. Private credit faces the same access problem. Tokenisation can repackage both into instruments with defined ownership rights and the ability to transfer, without fundamentally changing the underlying risk.
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Precious metals illustrate how quickly this can scale. According to Hu, two of the largest tokenised physical gold products have already accumulated billions of dollars in assets, with daily turnover four times that of comparable ETFs. They track physical gold closely while offering better liquidity, giving investors a simpler way to gain exposure without holding the metal directly.
Every tokenised real-world asset still needs someone to verify that the underlying asset exists and that the rights attached to it are enforceable. That reliance on a central authority is precisely where regulated institutions, banks, custodians and financial intermediaries retain an advantage that blockchain alone cannot replicate. For them, Hu argues, the model plays to an old strength: trust.
Stablecoins are the next part of that system. As tokenised assets move toward real-time settlement, the payment layer beneath them needs to keep pace. That is where stablecoins could become “fundamental financial infrastructure”, says Hu.
With monthly stablecoin transfer volumes already surpassing Visa, Hu shares that the market has become too large to sit outside mainstream payment oversight. The US signed the GENIUS Act into law in July 2025, while Hong Kong’s stablecoin ordinance followed in August. Singapore had set out issuer requirements two years earlier. In short, stablecoins alone have gone from a niche crypto tool to a payment market that regulators are now moving to embrace. “It is becoming a faster, cheaper, and more efficient way of moving your capital, whenever you want it,” says Hu.
