71% of UK Financial Leaders Expect Tokenisation to Reshape Finance

What happened

Lloyds has published the tenth edition of its Financial Institutions Sentiment Survey, finding that 71% of senior leaders across UK banks, insurers, financial sponsors and asset and wealth managers expect tokenisation to reshape how money and assets move through the financial system. The survey, carried out between April and May 2026, canvassed 100 senior figures from across the UK financial services sector.

According to Finextra's reporting on the findings, the result signals a notable shift in sentiment: a clear majority of institutional leaders now view tokenisation — the process of representing ownership of assets such as deposits, bonds or funds as digital tokens on shared ledgers — as a structural change to financial infrastructure rather than a niche experiment.

Why it matters

Tokenisation sits at the intersection of infrastructure modernisation and customer experience. If institutions move settlement, custody and transfer processes onto tokenised rails, the practical effect for end users could be faster transactions, more programmable financial products, and new ways of accessing or fractionalising assets that were previously illiquid or slow to settle. For leaders running digital transformation programmes, the survey suggests tokenisation is moving from the innovation lab into mainstream strategic planning.

For the sector as a whole, this level of sentiment — nearly three-quarters of senior leaders — indicates that boards and transformation teams will increasingly need to plan for tokenised infrastructure alongside, or as a replacement for, legacy payment and settlement systems. That has implications not just for operations and risk, but for how front-line products and services are eventually designed and delivered to customers.

By the numbers

• 71% of surveyed UK financial institution leaders believe tokenisation will reshape how money and assets move through the financial system.
• 100 senior leaders were surveyed across UK banks, insurers, financial sponsors and asset and wealth managers.
• This is the 10th annual edition of Lloyds' Financial Institutions Sentiment Survey.
• The survey was conducted between April and May 2026.

The Renascence take

A sentiment survey is not an implementation roadmap, and that gap is worth sitting with. Belief that tokenisation will reshape finance is now widespread among senior leaders — but belief is cheap, and infrastructure change is not. The real test for institutions is whether this conviction translates into funded programmes, customer-facing propositions and risk frameworks, or whether it remains a strategic talking point that sits comfortably in board decks without reaching operations.

What most commentary on tokenisation misses is that the technology question is already largely solved; the harder problem is behavioural and organisational. Customers won't adopt tokenised products because the plumbing is elegant — they'll adopt them if the experience feels safer, faster or more transparent than what they already trust. Institutions that treat this 71% as licence to start a technical migration, without first designing the customer-facing trust signals and service journeys around it, will build infrastructure nobody asked to use. The leaders worth watching are the ones pairing tokenisation investment with genuine experience design — not just settlement speed.