3.5 Who Benefits and How: Issuers, Investors, Institutions
Which parties capture measurable value from tokenization today, what controlled evidence shows about issuer borrowing costs and fees, why institutions are the clearest beneficiaries so far, and which intermediaries the disintermediation story gets wrong.
Benefit claims in tokenization are usually stated in the abstract, as though efficiency accrues to the system rather than to somebody in particular. It does not. Every gain lands on a specific balance sheet, and several of the gains most often cited turn out, on inspection, to land nowhere measurable yet. This section closes Chapter 3 by assigning the benefits to the parties that actually receive them, using the evidence assembled across the preceding four sections.
Section 3.4 established that continuous settlement and composability are the two capabilities without conventional equivalents, and that each carries a cost the benefit framing omits. What follows applies those findings, together with the scale, access, and liquidity results, to the three groups the tokenization case is usually made to.
Issuers: Cheaper Money, Not a Cheaper Process
The best evidence on the issuer side comes from a controlled comparison rather than a case study, which makes it unusually informative for a market this young.
Born, Evrard, Lambert, Schuster and Tskhakaya, writing in the ECB's Macroprudential Bulletin in April 2026, matched 41 tokenised bonds against 546 conventional bonds and compared outcomes 1. Tokenised bonds priced at a yield spread at issuance 0.14 percentage points lower on average, a roughly 40 percent reduction against comparable conventional issues, statistically significant at the 5 percent level 1.
Fourteen basis points is a real saving, and on a large programme it is the kind of number that justifies a technology decision on its own.
The second finding matters more for how the benefit is usually sold. Underwriting fees showed no statistically significant difference, coming in 0.04 percentage points higher for tokenised bonds 1. The saving is in the price investors demand, not in what intermediaries charge to arrange the deal.
That distinction undercuts the most common issuer pitch, which promises large reductions in issuance cost through automation and disintermediation. On this evidence the arranging cost did not fall at all. What fell was the yield, which is to say investors accepted less compensation, plausibly because the instrument settles better or because scarcity and novelty attracted demand. An issuer evaluating tokenization should expect cheaper money rather than a cheaper process, and should be sceptical of vendor figures claiming the opposite.
The authors are careful about how far this travels. They emphasise a nascent market and a small sample, note the results should be read against the market's limited size, and flag that findings for retail-accessible tokenised bonds reversed but rested on only three bonds 1. This is suggestive evidence from a young market, not a settled parameter.
A Note on Liquidity
The same study found bid-ask spreads on tokenised bonds 0.05 percentage points lower over time, a 27 percent reduction relative to conventional bonds, significant at the 5 percent level 1.
That cuts against the general finding in Section 3.3, and it should be stated rather than buried. Tokenised bonds appear to trade with modestly tighter spreads than their conventional equivalents.
It is also consistent with the mechanism that section identified. Bonds have reference markets, established pricing conventions, and fungible terms. They are exactly the category where a token can inherit existing liquidity and improve on its operational margins. The claim that failed in Section 3.3 was that tokenization creates liquidity where none existed, in private credit and real estate. The claim supported here is narrower and different: where a functioning market already exists, tokenization can tighten it somewhat. Both results point the same way about which assets tokenization suits.
Investors: Yield First, Access Second
For investors the benefit is more concentrated than the marketing suggests, and it is not primarily access.
The dominant investor benefit today is straightforward yield with operational convenience. Tokenized Treasury products held $15.65 billion across 101 funds at a seven-day yield of 3.74 percent as of 16 September 2026 2, and holders use them as cash management instruments that settle continuously. That is a real product improvement over a conventional money market fund with a daily cut-off, particularly for holders who already operate on-chain.
The access benefit, examined in Section 3.2, is genuine but bounded by securities law rather than by technology, and the participation data shows an institutional rather than a retail holder base. An investor expecting tokenization to open private markets to them is waiting on a regulatory change, not a technical one.
The liquidity benefit is asset-specific, better for bonds and gold, largely absent for private credit, and the redemption channel most holders actually use is a claim on the issuer rather than a market.
Institutions: Collateral Efficiency Is the Live Case
Institutions are the clearest beneficiaries today, and the reason is composability rather than any of the retail-facing arguments.
A tokenized money market fund posted as derivatives margin earns yield and satisfies a margin requirement at the same time, and can be moved outside business hours. BUIDL's acceptance as collateral on the Crypto.com Exchange and on Deribit 3 is the worked example, and it explains why tokenized Treasuries became the largest RWA category rather than the asset classes with more romantic narratives.
Institutional intent is consistent with this. State Street's 2025 study found a majority of institutions expecting 10 to 24 percent of institutional investments to be made via digital assets or tokenized instruments by 2030, with private equity at 63 percent and private fixed income at 53 percent named as the asset classes expected to be tokenized first 4. In the 2026 EY-Parthenon and Coinbase survey, 63 percent of institutional investors described their firm as very interested in tokenized assets, up from 57 percent a year earlier 5.
Two cautions apply. Stated intent is not allocation, and the asset classes institutions say will be tokenized first, private equity and private fixed income, are precisely the illiquid categories where Section 3.3 found the liquidity case weakest. The expectation and the evidence are pointing at different assets.
Who Does Not Benefit Yet
An honest ledger has a negative column.
Retail investors have not yet received the access that dominates the popular case, for the reasons set out in Section 3.2. Holders of illiquid private assets have not received tradability, for the reasons in Section 3.3. Issuers have not received cheaper arranging, on the ECB's evidence 1. And smaller participants face a fragmentation cost, because the requirement to hold settlement assets across multiple ledgers 6 falls hardest on those least able to pre-fund positions in several places at once.
These are not permanent verdicts. They are the current state, and each has a named blocker that Chapters 5 and 6 examine.
The Intermediaries That Do Not Disappear
The disintermediation story is the part of the benefit case that the evidence contradicts most directly.
Section 2.4 established the principle: tokenization redistributes trust rather than removing it. The institutional products that actually work are staffed accordingly. They have custodians holding the underlying assets, fund administrators striking NAV, transfer agents maintaining registers, oracle providers supplying data, and issuers standing behind redemption. IOSCO's finding that tokenized fund trading remains restricted to whitelisted investors 7 describes a market with an active gatekeeper, not an absent one.
What changes is which intermediary does what, and how much of the work is automated inside the ones that remain. Some post-trade functions genuinely compress. Custody, valuation, and legal registration do not, because they are answers to questions a ledger cannot answer about the off-chain world.
For anyone modelling the economics, this is the correction that matters most. A business case built on removing intermediaries will not survive contact with a compliant product. A business case built on those intermediaries operating against a shared record, with fewer reconciliations between them, describes what the successful products actually did.
When Tokenization Does Not Pay
The benefits above are conditional, and the conditions are specific enough to be checked in advance.
Tokenization is unlikely to pay where the asset has no functioning reference market. Section 3.3 found liquidity inherited rather than created, so an issuer tokenizing an asset that nobody can price will get a faster wrapper around the same illiquidity, plus the cost of building it.
It is unlikely to pay where the goal is lower arranging cost. The ECB comparison found no significant reduction in underwriting fees 1, so a business case resting on cheaper issuance mechanics is resting on something the only controlled study available did not observe.
It is unlikely to pay where the participant cannot fund gross settlement. Atomic settlement requires each trade to be fully funded at execution, and BIS research finds this generally requires more liquidity than netted settlement, with multi-ledger cash holdings raising aggregate requirements further 6. A participant whose advantage came from netting efficiency may be giving up more than it gains.
And it is unlikely to pay where broad distribution is the point. The compliance layer that makes a token legally issuable restricts who may hold it, and IOSCO found tokenized fund trading confined to whitelisted investors 7. An issuer seeking the widest possible investor base is choosing an instrument that narrows it.
This also suggests how to read the larger vendor and consultancy estimates. Deloitte's 2026 banking outlook, as summarised for executives, frames early movers in securities services as capturing 15 to 20 percent margin improvement 8. That may prove right. It is a projection of a strategic position rather than a measurement, and it sits beside an ECB study that measured 14 basis points on yield and nothing on fees. Where a measured result and a projected one disagree about the same mechanism, the measured one deserves the heavier weight, and the gap between them is worth understanding before it is budgeted against.
What Chapter 3 Establishes
Taken together, the four preceding sections support a narrower conclusion than the chapter title implies, and a more useful one.
RWAs matter today because they make high-quality, fungible, yield-bearing collateral programmable, and because the issuers of such instruments appear to raise money slightly more cheaply. The benefits concentrate in short-duration credit, among institutional participants, on the composability and settlement dimensions. They are largely absent in the illiquid private markets that the forecasts assume will drive the category to trillions.
That gap between where the benefits land and where the growth is projected is the central tension of this paper. Chapter 4 turns from benefits to the ecosystem delivering them, examining the protocols, chains, and participants that make up the live market, and Chapter 5 takes up the risks that the same structure creates.
- Issuers get cheaper money, not a cheaper process. The ECB matched 41 tokenised bonds against 546 conventional ones and found yield spreads at issuance 0.14 percentage points lower, about 40 percent, while underwriting fees showed no significant difference.
- The same study found bid-ask spreads 27 percent tighter on tokenised bonds, which qualifies the general liquidity finding. Tokenization tightens markets that already function; it does not create markets that do not.
- Investors' real benefit today is yield with continuous settlement, not access. Tokenized Treasuries paid a 3.74 percent seven-day yield across $15.65 billion and 101 funds in September 2026, held by a mostly institutional base.
- Institutions capture the clearest gain through collateral efficiency, with BUIDL accepted as margin on Crypto.com and Deribit. Yet institutions name private equity and private fixed income as the next assets to tokenize, which are the categories where the liquidity case is weakest.
- Intermediaries do not disappear. Working products retain custodians, administrators, transfer agents, and oracle providers, so the credible business case is fewer reconciliations between intermediaries rather than their removal.