Swiss regulator approves its first retail tokenised securities trading platform

The Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority, known as FINMA, has approved a retail trading platform, enabling retail users to trade tokenised securities and digital assets.

Taurus, a digital asset infrastructure for banks and institutions, is now extending its TDX trading platform to retail investors.

“Private markets 2.0 shall be digitised, so that buying a private security becomes as easy as buying a book on Amazon,” said Yann Isola, TDX head of product, in a statement.

The development comes as experts have named 2024 as the year tokenisation takes off.

New institutional investment is expected to follow the recent approval of US Bitcoin spot ETFs.

One of the benefits, according to a Taurus release, is that companies will be able to access primary and secondary markets for digital assets which boosts digital securities’ liquidity.

“FINMA is a very thorough regulator and not an easy regulator to get approvals through,” Leo Mizuhara, CEO of decentralised asset management platform Hashnote, told DL News. But, the regulators are “forward thinking” when it comes to digital assets.

While the development may be notable for the expanded regulatory approval for tokenisation, for the retail users it may not be as significant, Mizuhara said:

“There is not a real difference for investors between securities in their brokerage account and a tokenised version of it. Most people who want access to this type of financial product probably already had it.”

Have a tip about crypto in Europe? Contact the author at inbar@dlnews.com.