The future of asset management is shifting to the chain, but the transition exposes a major structural conflict over traditional corporate income.
Jenny Johnson, CEO of Franklin Templeton, a $1.74 trillion asset manager, spoke openly on a panel at the Proof of Talk summit in Paris about the industry’s hesitancy to deploy decentralized networks. According to Johnson, large financial companies are lagging behind because the public blockchain architecture directly threatens their existing profitability.
“This technology threatens many of the business models that exist in traditional finance today,” Johnson said bluntly. “If you see any hesitation, it’s because there’s a threat to the business model. Think about the toll takers in a transaction.”
She explained that if a blockchain can handle settlement directly through a smart contract, big 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 significant transaction efficiencies. To demonstrate the cost savings, Johnson cited the history of Franklin Templeton running his 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 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 is expanding its digital asset strategy through a new partnership with MoonPay, which will allow institutional investors to switch between stablecoins and the asset manager’s tokenized money market fund via an onchain workflow.
“In everyday life, everyone – individual, medium or large company – wants to have a reliable party,” Johnson noted. “We don’t want to keep our assets in our private wallets, in our safe deposit boxes 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 from institutional wealth to digital assets will depend entirely on building standard, low-cost compliance rails for existing mutual funds. While Blockstream CEO Adam Back pointed out that bitcoin allows users to maintain true tax privacy without an institutional partner, Johnson concluded that mainstream investors will continue to demand a heavily regulated custodial layer.