Speaking at the Proof of Talk summit in Paris, Jenny Johnson, CEO of the $1.74 trillion asset manager Franklin Templeton, openly addressed why major financial firms are dragging their feet on deploying decentralized networks.
"This technology threatens a huge number of business models that exist today in traditional finance," Johnson stated. "If you see any kind of hesitation, it's because there is a threat to the business model. Think about the toll-takers in a transaction."
She explained that if a blockchain can handle settlement instantly via a smart contract, large banks can no longer collect transaction fees as third-party intermediaries. To back up the cost argument, Johnson cited Franklin Templeton’s own experience running its tokenized money market fund, Benji, on the Stellar blockchain. "It was so dramatically cheaper," she said, comparing the legacy cost of about $1.30 per transaction for 50,000 transactions to just $1.13 on Stellar.
The comments came just hours after the Wall Street giant announced a new partnership with MoonPay, enabling institutional investors to move between stablecoins and the asset manager's tokenized fund through an onchain workflow. While Johnson acknowledged that traditional custodians and banks still have a future in providing trusted third-party custody, Blockstream CEO Adam Back noted that bitcoin offers true fiscal privacy without an institutional partner. Johnson concluded that most investors will continue to demand a heavily regulated custody layer.
