Investigating the future of digital assets in financial services
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Full Text E-thesis
Date
2025
Authors
Stanley, Christopher
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Publisher
University College Cork
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Abstract
The growth of digital assets and the underlying technology that underpins them – distributed ledger technology – has been highlighted by their popularity amongst retail consumers and general popular culture throughout their emergence in the last decade. These novel forms of assets and their associated technology have significantly altered perspectives of many retail investors on how currency is managed and distributed in the modern technological era. However, there is still a lack of clarity on if and how large institutions across the financial services could leverage these assets and technology to their benefits. This lack of clarity is a key contributing factor to the overarching research objective of this paper. That being to understand digital assets on a more fundamental level, with a view to how they may be adopted and leveraged by organisations across the financial services industry. Existing literature on the area facilitates a more fundamental understanding of digital assets and associated processes across chapters 2 and 3, whilst chapter 4 delves deeper into their use by stakeholders across the financial services industry. Chapter 2 proposes a framework which can be used to classify digital assets and delves into some of the key detailed information around digital assets in the process. This framework adds to the existing body of information around digital assets and given the lack of an existing framework for classifying digital assets according to their structural properties, provides a useful means of doing so. Following this, chapter 3 further explores digital assets, but with a focus on their associated process of conversion called Tokenisation. Tokenisation is examined by comparing it to the process of digitalisation and a conceptual framework is derived which can be used to evaluate the suitability of traditional financial assets to be converted to digital assets through tokenisation. Once the fundamental concepts around digital assets are thoroughly understood, chapter 4 examines how companies within financial services could leverage these digital assets within their respective organisations. This chapter uses foresight research techniques to garner a more future oriented perspective on the application of digital assets within financial services. Results from chapter 2 show that the digital asset classification framework could be utilised for classification, ownership and regulatory purposes, and identifies a core issue for regulation in the area as being a lack of a consistent framework based on the structure of the assets themselves. Chapter 3 gives context to the landscape of tokenisation and demonstrates the importance of organisations considering the suitability of an asset to the process ahead of tokenising it. Chapter 4 finds that trust is the key factor to be considered by organisations operating in the financial services industry if they are to leverage the perceived value that digital assets offer, detailing ways that organisations could address this in the process.
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Keywords
Digital assets , Blockchain , Financial services , Disruption
Citation
Stanley, C. A. 2025. Investigating the future of digital assets in financial services. MRes Thesis, University College Cork.