Yesterday the Mediobanca Group announced the issuance of tokenized shares of investment funds. The issue is operating within a sandbox of the Ministry of Economy and Finance.

The tokens reflect the conventional process of issuing and redeeming units in its UCITS fund “Mediobanca Global Multimanager 35”. While transactions are recorded using the blockchain, conventional transaction records are what are valid from a legal perspective.

Nonetheless, these are important steps on the path to tokenization. The tokens were issued to a select group of clients in May and were rolled out to certain clients of CheBanca!, the bank’s wealth management brand, earlier this month. A wallet was provided to store the tokens.

“Security tokens are an emerging trend in the financial sector, as evidenced by their continued growth internationally,” said Emilio Franco, CEO of Mediobanca SGR. “Mediobanca is the first to propose this instrument subscription modality in Italy, which will open up new scenarios in asset management for the future, with clear advantages in terms of efficiency and transparency for the entire subscription process, and in terms of investment accessibility.”

For the project, Mediobanca partnered with Cetif Advisory, the consulting arm of the Italian university. For the issuance it used the Lionity platform from Cetif Advisory. We inquired about the blockchain technology involved, but did not receive an answer in time for publication. Projects that directly target investors often use public blockchains, but Mediobanca referred to DLT instead of blockchain.

In addition, Reply participated as a technological partner and Linklaters in the legal aspect.

Meanwhile, Italian asset manager Azimut has been embracing blockchain for some time. More than two years ago, it tokenized a loan portfolio.

Over the past year, the asset management sector has ramped up its blockchain activities. Last month, the UK abrdn tokenized a money market fund on the public Hedera DLT. And Schroders is working on fund tokenization with the Calastone fund distribution platform.