How BNP Paribas Is Building for an Onchain World | BNP Paribas with Chainlink Labs at Sibos 2026

Hi everyone. So Wayne Hughes I lead a lot of our central initiatives for digital assets within security services of BMP Barryba. I'm embedded within the product organization. Our main objective actually is to help our product teams to extend our different services for a future with digital assets. [music] I think the first thing it demonstrated is [music] that it is possible to use public chains for regulated fund models.

That was really the the first objective that we wanted to accomplish. We used permission tokens on the public blockchain, a public Ethereum in this case, to really have complete control over who could own those um tokenized assets. What I think it also though demonstrated is that in an environment like this of tokenized assets, it's still important to connect in to the traditional processing chains. One thing that's very nice, let's say from our perspective of a private permission blockchain is that there's an operator. So when something goes wrong, you know who to call.

And then also things around privacy and other factors like that are much easier on a private permission blockchain. While you scalability, you know, really getting liquidity sometimes seems challenging know in that in that environment. Then public blockchains obviously have that critical mass you know broader distribution that sometimes is missing on the on the private chains while clear concerns around privacy security etc. So our perspective there is really that it's not one or the other really we see a future where different use cases different requirements will be you know le leveraging one or the other [music] and actually we believe that's a quite critical point no because at least on our perspective you know the transition to digital assets we believe will take a quite extended amount of time so that traditional and digital will have to coexist during that period. period.

So, a lot of our focus actually is to help our clients manage that transition, minimizing the impacts for them and really providing them an operating model that covers both traditional and digital, allowing them to continue to use the same communication channels, get the same reporting from us as they do today. [music] I think that's another one of the challenges today. You know, there's a lot of fragmentation out there. So, a lot of competing chains. We really don't believe we'll get to the point where there's one chain.

We kind of hope we don't have hundreds either, but you know, we do think it could be reasonable to assume that we have a a dozen chains or something like that. Probably, you know, different chains for different use cases, maybe for different regions. So, yeah, a lot of our focus right now is actually to have that abstraction layer because on our side, this is really a multiple to multiple connectivity. So we've got a lot of different platforms that need to talk to a lot of different blockchains. So that abstraction layer is actually quite critical to facilitate that back and forth communication.

[music] Our focus a couple years ago kind of very correctly was on the technology. I think now we feel quite comfortable with the technology but as the question implies it does take a lot more. One of the biggest challenges on our side is really the functions. So legal compliance risk even just getting that those people up to speed on the real risk here was a lot of the work we had to do over the last couple years. So you know I think apart from the technology per se one of the critical points is really just getting the full organization engaged up to speed and starting to understand what this technology really means for their area of expertise.