Tokenisation: Collaborating For Markets Of The Future

The UK government’s 10-year strategy for the Financial Services sector aims to deliver, by 2035, the UK as the global location of choice for financial services firms to invest, innovate, grow and sell their services. So, when it comes to innovation, digital assets and digital markets are key areas. The UK Wholesale Digital Markets Champion, Christopher Woolard, notes that there is a clear focus on the opportunities of tokenisation. In his first report, published in July 2026, he sets out a framework describing how the UK can develop a tokenised wholesale financial markets system.

Notable is the statement “Put simply, tokenised markets are fundamental to the future of financial services. What the UK does here determines our right to be at the heart of the next generation of financial markets”. Looking to how the UK can deliver this, one notable achievement by the UK government is the launch of the Transatlantic Taskforce for Markets of the Future (TTMF) in September 2025. Set up by HM Treasury and the US Treasury, its aim was to develop recommendations to advance UK-US financial services collaboration, with a focus on digital assets and capital markets. From the UK perspective this was aimed at converting the UK’s global strength into growth, starting with open markets and practical regulatory cooperation.

TTMF committed to reporting initial recommendations via a UK-US Financial Regulatory Working Group (FRWG).

Work that translates into meaningful progress

In July 2026, the TTMF published their recommendations for both digital assets and capital markets.

Focussing specifically on digital assets, the report acknowledges the UK and US as leading global financial centres, putting into perspective the opportunity available and the importance therefore of leveraging this to actively shape the development of digital asset markets and next-generation financial infrastructure. Cognisant of ongoing development of legislative and regulatory frameworks in both jurisdictions, the report rightly points out there is a timely opportunity to strengthen bilateral collaboration on digital assets and importantly to promote innovation.

The TTMF notes that industry engagement has shown a clear desire to deepen cross-border connectivity, reduce market fragmentation and accelerate adoption of tokenisation for the benefit of consumers and businesses working across both jurisdictions.

So what does the TTMF recommend? Targeted steps are aimed at:

• improving connectivity,
• enabling more efficient and transparent markets, and
• informing potential alignment of regulatory frameworks

The recommendations include actions to facilitate:

• cross-border activity
• support innovation through real-world use cases
• reinforce the competitiveness and global leadership of both the UK and US financial sectors

The result

The five recommendations relating to digital assets focus on:

1. Engaging a private sector-led group to focus on industry experimentation and testing of cross-border use cases for tokenised assets
2. UK and US authorities aiming to identify common approaches to the regulatory treatment of tokenised assets
3. Developing and publishing a joint statement on stablecoins
4. Supporting financial innovation with robust policy frameworks for digital financial services
5. Working to support the targeted review of standards for the prudential treatment of cryptoassets

The future is happening now

What is clear is that the focus on digital assets and markets of the future is at the heart of the UK government’s strategy for the Financial Services sector. The work on many initiatives, including the Wholesale Digital Markets Champion and TTMF provides an opportunity for the UK to show leadership and work collaboratively with the US to deliver on this opportunity.

For further information on the TTMF, read more here

To read the Report from the Wholesale Digital Markets Champion, click here

Terms and definitions taken from the Report from the Wholesale Digital Markets Champion, July 2026

Tokenisation: Digital representation of assets using distributed ledger technology (DLT)

Tokenised securities: Digital representation of existing traditional securities, as well as securities issued only on DLT that have new features (such as programmability) and that are dependent on the design of each token.