Super funds lend voice to tokenisation

AustralianSuper, Aware Super and Australian Retirement Trust are among the superannuation funds joining a new advisory group established by the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) and Digital Finance CRC (DFCRC) to help shape the development of tokenisation in wholesale financial markets.

The Australian Tokenisation Advisory Group (ATAG) brings together representatives from banks, superannuation funds, exchanges, payment providers and digital asset business, alongside government and regulators.

Its first meeting is scheduled for early November, following the completion of Project Acacia's experimental and research phase.

DFCRC's Tony Richard will chair the group, which includes representatives from major institutions such as the Commonwealth Bank, NAB, ANZ, Westpac, AustralianSuper, Aware Super, Australian Retirement Trust and ASX. Senior representatives from the RBA, Treasury, APRA and ASIC will also attend the meetings.

The group follows Project Acacia, a joint RBA and DFCRC initiative exploring how tokenised assets and digital forms of money could operate across Australia's wholesale financial markets. Its final report identified potential benefits including faster settlement, improved capital efficiency and reduced counterparty risk, with estimated annual economic gains of $24 billion.

AUDD chief executive Effie Dimitropoulos, an ATAG member, said the next challenge was translating experimentation into practical adoption.

"Project Acacia demonstrated the potential for tokenised assets and digital money to work together in Australia's financial markets. It's encouraging to see the RBA and DFCRC continue that work through ATAG, bringing industry, regulators and government together to focus on what comes next," she said.

Dimitropoulos said settlement and infrastructure would be central to expanding tokenisation beyond pilot programs, with stablecoins potentially helping facilitate payments for tokenised assets.

"The opportunity now is to address the interoperability, liquidity and regulatory challenges that will allow it to operate at a much greater scale," Dimitropoulos said.

The DFCRC said members were selected from a large pool of applicants based on their digital finance expertise and representation across the wholesale market ecosystem.

It has also established an Australian Tokenisation Network to involve a broader range of participants and perspectives in the work, with further details to follow.