Yesterday, French regulator AMF updated its list of digital asset licenses to include AXA Investment Management, as first reported by Coindesk. The asset manager has a license for the custody of digital assets, to buy and sell digital assets and trade them.

The other two well-known institutions with AMF licenses include Societe Generale Forge, which received its license in September last year, and Caisse des Depots, the state-owned social impact bank that has long been an innovator in the digital asset sector.

AXA IM and Societe Generale – Forge have an existing relationship. In December 2021, the asset manager invested in the European Investment Bank’s blockchain public bond on behalf of AXA France. SocGen managed the Ethereum issuance using its infrastructure and sold the bonds to AXA IM.

“Blockchain can have disruptive power for asset management processes, as part or all of the asset management value chain could benefit from this technology in the long term,” said Laurence Arnold in December 2021. She is a director of Innovation Management and Strategic Initiatives at AXA. AM. “We believe this could improve the customer experience by speeding up the processing of financial transactions and making it easier to share and store data.”

A digital asset license does not necessarily indicate a strong interest in cryptocurrencies. Times have changed, but in 2021 AXA IM said it would not invest in Bitcoin for environmental reasons. He expressed interest in other cryptocurrencies, but said he was not willing to develop them at that stage. However, he is very bullish on DeFi.

“We fundamentally think that the future of fund management depends more on newly created DeFi techniques rather than adjusting our existing operating models to fit a decentralized system.”

At the end of this month, the EU DLT Pilot Scheme comes into force, which should stimulate the issuance of tokenized securities.