Transcript
A (0:00)
Hi, I'm Kelly Cavagnaro, Managing Director, head of North America Institutional Distribution at Janice Henderson Investors. We believe working together is the way to work better. Like combining your portfolio plans and our in depth strategy, your valued assets and our valuable insights. Your mission and our vision working in harmony to seek the right investment opportunities. JANICE Henderson Investors Investing in a brighter future together. JP Morgan's tokenized private equity fund is the bank's first step towards a broader rollout of its fund tokenization platform.
B (0:41)
There have been sporadic efforts by banks or asset managers to develop tokenized funds. So definitely this is kind of one of the hottest topics on Wall Street.
A (0:53)
Plus, data analysis firm Palantir is suing two former employees for allegedly stealing company secret. And companies including Apple and Amazon report strong quarterly results. It's Thursday, October 30th. I'm Alex Osola for the Wall Street Journal. This is the PM edition of what's News, the top headlines and business stories that move the world. Today, we're exclusively reporting that JPMorgan Chase has tokenized a private equity fund on its blockchain platform, an offering that is available to the wealthy clients served by its private bank. It the first step in the bank's effort to make investing in alternative assets easier. Vicky Gehuang covers crypto and retail investing for WSJ and is here now with more. Okay, Vicky, what is tokenization?
B (1:42)
So tokenization is essentially the conversion of either financial assets or real world assets into tradable tokens on the blockchain. And in this case, JP Morgan is converting the investor's ownership interest in this private equity fund into a token on its own blockchain called Kinexus Digital Assets. Alternative investments as a whole is a pretty complex and often opaque space. It includes private equity funds, private credit funds, real estate funds or hedge funds. So these are usually the domain of elites, wealthy investors who can meet that investment minimum threshold to invest in these products. And for JP Morgan, they have an entire ecosystem of alternative investments participants within the bank itself. And for an alternative investment fund to work, it's actually a very complex and cumbersome process. There is a lot of documents involved and fund managers usually have to do this thing called capital call where they call on the investor to actually send them the funds that they previously committed to invest. The good thing about the blockchain is that all the parties involved in the management of the fund and the investing of the funds and owning of the funds, all the parties involved in this process can see the real time data. And just having this helps people make decisions about the investment process.
