Three Big Finance Companies Just Teamed Up on a Blockchain Money Fund—Here's What That Means

What They're Building

DBS Group, Franklin Templeton, and Ripple announced a deal in September 2025 to offer something called a tokenised money market fund. Think of it as a traditional money fund—the safe, short-term savings product banks and companies use—but wrapped up in blockchain technology so it can move faster and more flexibly.

The three partners are an unusual combination: one of Asia's biggest banks, one of the world's oldest investment firms, and a blockchain company that has spent years in legal disputes with US regulators. The fact that they all agreed to work together signals something important: institutional finance is genuinely adopting blockchain infrastructure, not just experimenting with it.

How This Works in Practice

A money market fund normally invests in ultra-safe, short-term loans to governments and large companies. When you buy a share of a traditional money market fund, you own a piece of that portfolio. Settlement takes time—usually one or two business days to complete the transaction.

A tokenised money market fund does the same job, but the fund shares exist as digital tokens on a blockchain. This matters because tokens can be transferred instantly, around the clock, without the normal wait times. For big institutional investors—pension funds, insurance companies, family offices managing wealth across multiple countries—this speed and flexibility can make a real difference to how they manage cash day-to-day.

Here's how the three companies divide the work:

• Franklin Templeton manages the actual money—buying the government bonds and short-term loans that make up the fund.
• Ripple provides the digital infrastructure: the blockchain technology (called the XRP Ledger) that records and settles all token transfers.
• DBS Bank handles the banking side: keeping custody of the assets, distributing the fund to its wealthy clients in Singapore and the region, and converting ordinary money into and out of tokens.

Why Singapore, and Why Now

DBS has been methodical about building digital finance infrastructure rather than just tolerating it. The bank launched its own digital asset exchange in 2020. By September 2025, a DBS-backed platform managing money for wealthy families had reached $780 million in assets, with plans to double that.

Singapore's financial regulator has also been running supervised experiments with blockchain-based finance since 2022. DBS was involved in these trials. The money market fund launch is not a speculative leap—it is a commercial deployment of infrastructure that has already been tested with regulatory approval.

The broader context here is that Singapore is positioning itself as a regional hub for institutional blockchain finance, and this deal fits that strategy.

The Ripple Question

You might ask: why use Ripple's blockchain at all, given that the company spent years fighting the US Securities and Exchange Commission?

The answer is jurisdictional. Because this deal is based in Singapore, it sidesteps that US legal battle entirely. Ripple has been focusing on selling blockchain services to banks and asset managers outside the United States. Winning this partnership with two major, well-regulated institutions is significant validation that its technology works for serious institutional use.

That said, most of the people and institutions using this money market fund will never directly interact with Ripple's blockchain. They will go through DBS Bank's systems and interfaces. The blockchain sits underneath, handling the technical work, but investors will barely notice it exists.

Similar Pattern, Familiar Story

We have seen this before. When Bitcoin ETFs launched in the US in January 2024—products like BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF—they wrapped a previously awkward asset inside a familiar, regulated vehicle. That simple packaging unlocked access for far more investors and institutions.

Tokenised money market funds follow the same logic. The product itself is not new—asset managers have tokenised things before. But wrapping it inside a bank relationship and a regulated fund structure makes it much easier for institutional investors to buy in. Their lawyers, compliance teams, and risk departments already understand traditional funds. A tokenised version in that familiar wrapper is a small step, not a leap.

It is worth noting that not everyone is moving this direction at the same pace. Vanguard confirmed in December 2025 that it has no plans to launch cryptocurrency ETFs or mutual funds. That reflects a deliberate choice, not a technical gap.

Who Benefits, and Why It Matters

For treasury teams at large companies and money managers at pension funds, the practical question is straightforward: does blockchain settlement speed actually make their operations easier?

The theory is compelling. If you can move a yield-bearing money market investment instantly, without waiting one or two days, that frees up cash for other uses. But it only works if the people on both sides of the transaction have compatible systems set up—which not everyone does yet.

For DBS Bank, this product launch continues a clear strategy: be the regulated middleman that makes blockchain finance accessible to institutional clients who do not want to manage their own blockchain accounts. With $780 million in a family office platform and now a tokenised money market fund, that strategy appears to be working.

The real question is whether this scales beyond Singapore. As it stands, the product works well within a single country's regulatory system. For it to become truly useful across borders, different countries would need to align their rules on how tokenised funds can move between them. That is a policy question, not a technology question.