At Sibos 2025, Fernando Vazquez, President of Capital Markets at Chainlink Labs, joined Sam Cauvin-Welsh, Head of Core Product for Global Custody at J.P. Morgan, and Dan Hickey, Head of Custody Product and Network Management at State Street, for a panel discussion about data and interoperability standards that bring capital markets onchain and enable tokenized real-world assets.
State Street, one of the world’s largest asset managers and custodians with over $4 trillion in assets under management, is the first third-party custodian on J.P. Morgan’s Digital Debt Service built on the firm’s multi-asset tokenization platform, Kinexys by J.P. Morgan.
Kinexys has partnered with Chainlink to demonstrate cross-chain DvP transactions powered end-to-end by the Chainlink Runtime Environment (CRE). The solution establishes how assets and payments can be exchanged simultaneously cross-chain, reducing counterparty and settlement risks that have cost market participants more than $914 billion over the past decade.
Vazquez highlighted collaboration between fintechs and traditional financial entities at the heart of scaling digital assets.
“People say that DLT is going to be disruptive, but I think the growth is going to be organic, and it’s important to bridge the traditional systems with the new ones,” he explained.
“We should not disrupt custody. We should not disrupt capital markets. Custodians are going to be playing a key role in change.”
All agreed that data and interoperability standards are critical to innovation.
“Global custodians’ job, if you look at the very foundation, is to connect together different markets and different financial market infrastructure,” Cauvin-Welsh explained.
“We’ve now got new types of technologies to interact with. The longer-term future of the custodian is bringing together all of those different market infrastructures and assets into one coherent service.”
Hickey described the shift from viewing fintechs as disruptors to key technology providers.
“It’s not seen as disruption anymore. It’s seen as innovation.”
“The whole move fast, break things approach – this is not the approach that we at Chainlink take,” Vazquez said. “We are not taking any shortcuts. It has to be institutional-grade, otherwise this mainstream adoption is not going to happen.”
He believes regulatory technology is the future. Specifically, the Chainlink Automated Compliance Engine (ACE), a unified standard for creating compliance-focused digital assets and services, is laying the groundwork for institutional capital to flow onchain.
“Being able to have global liquidity pools is part of the promise of DLT,” he said.
“We think ACE is going to be another key enabler to be able to have this global liquidity pool where you can originate globally and distribute globally with the help of global custodians.”
Watch the full panel.