Broadridge Financial Solutions released the results of its inaugural Tokenization Pulse Survey this week, and the headline numbers read like a consensus. Eighty-four percent of firms say tokenization is strategically important to their organization. Ninety-two percent expect digital and traditional assets to coexist for the foreseeable future. Sixty-eight percent believe tokenization will partially reshape financial markets within three to five years.
The survey, conducted by Phronesis Partners on Broadridge's behalf, polled 200 senior decision-makers across wealth management, asset management, capital markets and digital asset firms in the United States and Canada. Sixty-nine percent said they plan to hybridize existing infrastructure rather than build fully separate systems for tokenized assets, and nearly a third said they plan to increase tokenization investment by 26% to 50% or more over the next two years.
“Across the industry, there is clear recognition that tokenization has the potential to reshape how assets are issued, traded, financed, and serviced,” said German Soto Sanchez and Mark Nichols, co-presidents of digital assets at Broadridge, in the release. “These survey results underscore both the opportunities and challenges firms face as they seek to connect digital and traditional assets, support governance and controls, and build markets that are efficient, resilient, and trusted.”
Sitting inside that broad consensus, though, is one asset class where conviction thins out noticeably: equities. Eighty percent of respondents expect tokenized mutual funds and money market funds to play a meaningful role within five years. For equities, that figure drops to roughly half.
Capital markets firms are further along in implementation than asset managers and wealth managers, who are still building capabilities and evaluating operating models. Among capital markets firms, market infrastructure developments and institutional demand are cited about equally as the top sources of urgency, at 22% each. Asset managers weight infrastructure developments even more heavily, at 28%, followed by broader market momentum at 25%.
That pattern, mutual funds and money market funds pulling ahead while equities lag, has an intuitive explanation. A tokenized share of a money market fund is a simple, standardized claim that settles cleanly and doesn't carry corporate actions, proxy votes or dividend processing on top of it. A tokenized share of a public company does, and reconciling those obligations across onchain and offchain systems is precisely the kind of governance and servicing infrastructure that firms like Broadridge already run for traditional equities. It's a harder problem to wrap, which is likely why institutional respondents are more cautious about committing to it on a firm timeline.
That institutional caution sits awkwardly next to what's actually happening onchain. According to data published by a16z crypto this week, monthly transfer volume for tokenized stocks reached $9.22 billion in June, up from $53 million a year earlier, an increase of more than 170 times. The figure captures any onchain movement of tokenized equities, including trading, wallet-to-wallet transfers and collateral deposits into DeFi protocols, not spot trading volume alone. a16z crypto notes the market remains small next to traditional equities, which trade in the double-digit trillions of dollars per month, but the growth curve is the point: more issuers and platforms are bringing tokenized stocks online, and usage is compounding even as institutional surveys show hesitation about the asset class.
The two data sets aren't really contradicting each other so much as describing different markets. Broadridge's respondents are the custodians, transfer agents, broker-dealers and asset managers who sit inside the regulated plumbing of equity markets, the same plumbing responsible for shareholder voting, corporate actions and settlement finality. Their hesitation about equities reflects a real operational gap: nobody has fully solved how a tokenized share interacts with a company's official shareholder register, and that's not a problem a hybrid infrastructure roadmap resolves quickly. The transfer volume a16z is tracking, by contrast, is happening largely through crypto-native platforms and synthetic wrappers built for retail traders and DeFi users, running mostly outside the traditional transfer agency system altogether.
That split helps explain why a survey full of institutional conviction can coexist with a chart showing 170x growth in a segment those same institutions rank as their lowest priority. The demand for tokenized equity exposure isn't waiting on Broadridge's clients to finish building hybrid infrastructure. It's already showing up on exchanges and DeFi protocols willing to issue synthetic claims on stocks without the full governance stack behind them. Whether that volume eventually migrates onto the regulated rails institutions are cautiously building, or whether retail-driven tokenized equities and institution-grade tokenized funds simply remain two separate markets serving different users, is the question the Broadridge survey raises without answering.
For now, the institutional roadmap and the onchain data are both real, and both are describing the same asset class moving at two very different speeds.
