Aviva Investors has launched a tokenised share class of its Sterling Liquidity Fund, in partnership with blockchain-based enterprise solutions provider Ripple.
The investment fund, Aviva Investors’ largest, has approximately £22bn (€26.2bn) in assets under management.
The launch expands the asset manager’s tokenised fund offering following the introduction of a tokenised share class for its USD Liquidity Fund earlier this year.
Aviva Investors said it now has more than £86m invested across its two tokenised share classes, making it one of Europe’s largest providers of tokenised money market funds (MMFs).
Aviva has made an initial £50m investment in the new Sterling Liquidity Fund share class.
The fund uses a “digital twin” model, which allows the manager to introduce a digital access layer through which holdings can be represented on-chain while retaining the existing off-chain fund structure.
Investors benefit from the same investment objective, risk profile, liquidity characteristics and regulatory protections as the conventional fund, which was launched in 2002. The fund targets low-risk returns and daily liquidity through exposure to high-grade, short-term, sterling-denominated debt instruments.
The launch was supported by Komainu, a regulated institutional digital asset custodian, and Licuido, a digital infrastructure platform that enables asset managers to tokenise and trade real-world assets.
Mark Versey, chief executive officer of Aviva Investors, said: “This expansion of our tokenised offering shows our clear intent to be a leader in this area and sets the groundwork for a future expansion of our capabilities. We believe tokenised funds can increase efficiency and ultimately lead to improved client outcomes.”
Nigel Khakoo, senior vice president of trading and markets at Ripple, added: “Markets are moving to 24/7 access and settlement is moving to real-time, always-on rails; this launch shows what that looks like in practice.
“As the bridge between traditional and digital finance, Ripple is helping institutions move, manage, hold and tokenise value on the XRP Ledger, which is bringing the compliance, privacy and security features needed by institutions.”
