Ripple and SettleMint said on September 1 they have formed a strategic partnership that links Ripple Custody, the payments firm’s institutional-grade custody infrastructure, with SettleMint’s Digital Asset Lifecycle Platform (DALP), giving regulated financial institutions a single system to custody, issue, and manage tokenized assets. The joint announcement, issued from Singapore, said the two companies have already begun offering the combined product in Asia and plan to extend it into other markets as institutional demand develops.
The tie-up is aimed at a specific pain point: banks and asset managers that currently assemble separate vendors for custody, issuance, compliance, and servicing. By combining Ripple Custody and SettleMint’s DALP, the companies said, an institution can hold and govern digital assets and manage their entire post-launch lifecycle through one integrated solution, including the compliance and permissioning controls required by heavily regulated institutions.
What the Integration Combines
Ripple Custody is the firm’s institutional custody layer, which it has built out through work with partners such as Securosys and Figment, an integration with Chainalysis, and the acquisition of Palisade. SettleMint’s DALP is a composable lifecycle platform already used in production and pre-production programmes by institutions across North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia Pacific, spanning issuance, compliance, custody, settlement, and servicing.
Fiona Murray, Ripple’s managing director for Asia Pacific, said financial institutions in the region “are asking how to do more without stitching together separate solutions for custody, issuance and governance.” She described the partnership as giving them a foundation to roll out digital assets, with Ripple Custody holding and governing the asset and SettleMint managing its lifecycle.
The Institutional Tokenization Push
The partnership lands as banks and market-infrastructure operators move tokenized products into production. Ripple has been pushing deeper into institutional services, securing a full MiCA licence to operate across the European Economic Area and working with BBVA on digital-asset custody technology. SettleMint, headquartered in Leuven, Belgium with offices in the UAE, Singapore, and Japan, has separately discussed its tokenization work in markets such as Saudi Arabia.
The companies cited a Boston Consulting Group report, “The Future of Digital Assets,” published in May 2026, which projects tokenized real-world assets could reach $88 trillion by 2035 and warns that traditional banks failing to adapt could see profits fall by as much as 30% over the same period. Those figures are BCG’s estimates, not a Ripple or SettleMint result.
What Remains Unproven
The announcement is an early-stage product integration rather than a signed customer base. Neither company disclosed named clients, revenue, or a timeline beyond saying the offering has begun in Asia and will expand “as institutional demand develops.” Adam Popat, SettleMint’s chief executive, framed the move as a response to capital markets “moving fully on-chain,” but the partnership’s impact will depend on whether regulated institutions adopt a combined custody-and-lifecycle stack over separate, incumbent vendors.
The release also leaves open how the two companies will split responsibilities and pricing, and whether the integration will clear the procurement and regulatory reviews that large financial institutions apply to custody providers. Until named deployments are announced, the partnership is best read as a commitment to a unified custody-and-tokenization offering rather than evidence of completed adoption.
