Road to Success

Umar Farooq is chief executive of Onyx by JPMorgan, a unit of the US house that leverages blockchain technologies for transformative purposes in banking.

Euromoney catches up with him in Singapore on the edges of the country’s annual fintech festival, taking place in person for the first time since 2019. Our interview is prompted by JPMorgan’s role on a landmark decentralised finance (DeFi) deal stewarded by the Monetary Authority of Singapore.

But it also affords the opportunity to hear Farooq’s thoughts on some of the big digital issues of the day.

One of them is tokenization. That DeFi deal is a prime example, involving the tokenization both of cash and of government securities.

In theory, anything can be tokenized: bonds, loans, private markets like Series A or B funding rounds. But in practice, what is going to work?

“Some asset classes definitely don’t fit,” Farooq says. “Equities are an example, because they’re already so efficient that there may not be significant incremental benefits with current blockchain technology. And on the other end of the spectrum, you have syndicated loans, which are very complex assets that can takes weeks to settle.”