Ripple (XRP) Announces Major Banking and Institutional Deal

Ripple’s custody infrastructure and SettleMint’s asset management platform are now integrated into a single offering for regulated financial institutions seeking to custody, issue and manage tokenized assets. The partnership addresses institutional demand for consolidated solutions in Asia and signals Ripple’s ongoing buildout of enterprise blockchain infrastructure across payments, custody and treasury services.

• Ripple Custody integrates with SettleMint’s Digital Asset Lifecycle Platform to provide custody, issuance and governance in one system
• Boston Consulting Group projects tokenized real-world assets could reach $88 trillion by 2035, with banks risking 30% profit declines if unprepared
• Partnership launched in Asia and targets banks, market infrastructure operators and sovereign entities across multiple geographies

• $88T Projected tokenized real-world assets by 2035 versus current levels
• 30% Potential profit decline for banks failing to adapt to digital assets
• $4B Ripple’s cumulative M&A and corporate venture spending on crypto infrastructure
• <5 sec Settlement time for tokenized US Treasuries on XRP Ledger in JPMorgan pilot

Ripple Labs and SettleMint announced the strategic partnership in Singapore, immediately launching the integrated offering in Asia with plans to expand to other markets as institutional interest grows. The collaboration combines Ripple Custody with SettleMint’s Digital Asset Lifecycle Platform (DALP), creating a unified system that handles asset custody, issuance, compliance, settlement and servicing across the complete lifecycle of tokenized assets. The solution targets regulated financial institutions, market infrastructure operators and sovereign entities seeking to consolidate what have traditionally been separate vendor relationships.

Single platform consolidates fragmented Institutional workflows

Financial institutions managing digital assets currently piece together multiple vendors for custody, issuance and governance functions, creating operational complexity and integration overhead. The partnership addresses this friction by offering a single connected foundation where institutions can handle all functions without switching between platforms or managing separate compliance and settlement layers.

The fragmentation of institutional asset management workflows has historically required banks and operators to maintain relationships with specialized vendors, each focused on a single component of the tokenization lifecycle. This distributed approach introduces operational risk, increases compliance overhead and creates reconciliation challenges across systems that may not communicate seamlessly with one another.

“Financial institutions across Asia Pacific are putting digital assets to work. They are asking how to do more without stitching together separate solutions for custody, issuance and governance,” said Fiona Murray, Managing Director, Asia Pacific at Ripple. The consolidated approach simplifies infrastructure decisions for institutions that currently lack the engineering resources to integrate disparate platforms or the regulatory certainty to commit to multiple vendors simultaneously.

Ripple’s Custody stack built through strategic acquisitions

Ripple has constructed its custody infrastructure over time through a series of partnerships and acquisitions, allocating approximately $4 billion in cumulative M&A and corporate venture capital to crypto infrastructure. The company has integrated with Securosys and Figment for custody and infrastructure support, added compliance analytics capabilities through Chainalysis, and acquired Palisade, a wallet infrastructure provider that brought MPC-based key sharding and multi-chain support to Ripple’s offerings.

This acquisition strategy reflects Ripple’s long-term bet that enterprise blockchain infrastructure will eventually underpin institutional finance. Rather than building all capabilities organically, the company has identified specific gaps in its platform and acquired targeted technologies to fill them. Each acquisition has added layers of functionality that individual institutions would otherwise need to source independently.

SettleMint, headquartered in Leuven, Belgium with offices in the UAE, Singapore and Japan, contributes its composable DALP platform, which already operates in production and pre-production deployments across North America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia Pacific serving banks, market operators and government entities. The integration of both companies’ capabilities creates an end-to-end solution for institutions managing tokenized assets at scale. SettleMint’s existing customer base and operational deployments provide the partnership with immediate credibility and use case validation.

Real-World asset tokenization market projections drive Institutional demand

Boston Consulting Group’s May 2026 report projects that tokenized real-world assets could reach $88 trillion by 2035, representing a fundamental restructuring of financial infrastructure. The firm estimates that banks failing to adapt their operations to digital assets could see profits decline by as much as 30% over the same period, creating urgency for institutions to deploy scalable tokenization and custody systems.

The scale of this projected transformation extends beyond payments into treasury management, securities settlement and asset servicing. Real-world asset tokenization encompasses everything from government bonds and corporate debt to real estate and supply chain finance instruments. Each asset class presents distinct custody and compliance requirements that existing infrastructure was never designed to accommodate at the speeds and scales that blockchain networks enable.

Ripple’s existing pilot work in the region demonstrates near-term demand for these capabilities. In March, Ripple piloted RLUSD, its stablecoin, through Singapore’s central bank sandbox alongside supply chain finance firm Unloq, and the XRP Ledger recently settled tokenized US Treasuries in under five seconds during a cross-border pilot involving JPMorgan, Mastercard and Ondo Finance. Both RLUSD and XRP are named as core assets underpinning the new partnership’s offerings.

These pilots signal that central banks, systemically important financial institutions and major payment networks are treating tokenized asset infrastructure as a near-term operational priority rather than a long-term research initiative. The convergence of central bank interest, institutional capital deployment and regulatory clarification is compressing timelines for mainstream adoption.

The partnership signals Ripple’s shift from primarily facilitating cross-border payments to building comprehensive infrastructure for on-chain capital markets. SettleMint CEO Adam Popat stated that global capital markets are moving fully on-chain, requiring custody and lifecycle management to operate as integrated systems rather than separate components. The firms have not announced specific enterprise customers for the integrated platform or a timeline for rollout beyond Asia, making market adoption rates and competitive positioning against other custody and settlement providers the key variables to monitor. Success will depend on whether regulated institutions choose to consolidate around this integrated platform or continue assembling point solutions from multiple vendors as they have historically done.

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