Franklin Templeton CEO says all ETFs and mutual funds will be on blockchain

Jenny Johnson, the president and CEO of Franklin Templeton, a financial firm with $1.6 trillion in assets under management, recently reiterated her pro-blockchain stance during an interview with Bloomberg anchor David Westland during the 27th Annual Milken Institute Global Conference in California. 

Among the hot topics discussed by the two, Johnson had plenty to say on tokenization and generative artificial intelligence.

Tokenization

When asked how Franklin Templeton benefitted from tokenization, Johnson quickly replied, “First of all, I am a huge fan of blockchain and the technology.”

She described a situation where the company ran a side-by-side experiment to process account records using both traditional methods and blockchain for a period of six to eight months. As Johnson put it, the results were quite positive. “We were astonished by how much less costly it was to run it on blockchain.”

Johnson added:

She attributed this prediction to the “huge costs” associated with verifying data between disparate systems — a problem that blockchain was intentionally designed to solve. Johnson further pointed out that financial institutions and stakeholders still need to verify data between external parties once data is reconciled in-house.

“In the case of blockchain,” she stated, “there’s only one source of truth.”

The monetary and temporal savings can lead to more diversified investment opportunities, according to Johnson. She cited the use case of pop superstar Rhianna, who released a series of 300 nonfungible tokens that afforded their owners a tiny percentage of royalties for one of the artist’s songs via smart contract.

This is a reference Johnson has made in the past. As Cointelegraph reported back in October of 2023, the CEO relayed the Rhianna story during an interview with CNBC’s Delivering Alpha, wherein she discussed tokenization as “securitization done on steroids.”