S&P Global Ratings joins Singapore MAS’s Project Guardian

Independent credit ratings provider S&P Global Ratings has joined the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s Project Guardian to explore asset tokenization.

The company officially announced its participation on Thursday, confirming that it would contribute toward risk assessment in fixed income workstream. Specifically, S&P will develop analytic frameworks, assessments and benchmarks in digital assets and tokenized markets.

Andrew O’Neill, Digital Assets Analytical Lead at S&P Global Ratings believes that recent innovations in tokenized bonds have stressed the potential of digitalization to transform capital markets.

“We aim to bring our risk perspective and insights to this forum to support robust risk mitigation as this technology is applied in financial markets.”

Further, S&P’s robust risk assessment capabilities would aid both traditional finance (TradFi) and the crypto-native decentralized finance (DeFi) clients, said Chief DeFi Officer, Chuck Mounts.

S&P and Financial Heavyweights Join Project Guardian

The news comes a month after German multinational investment bank, Deutsche Bank, joined Project Guardian. The bank will test an open architecture and interoperable blockchain platform for servicing tokenized assets as part of the collaboration.

Project Guardian aims to explore diverse use cases of asset tokenization, including listing, distribution, trading, settlement, and asset servicing.

Additionally, the project includes international policymakers and banking behemoths including BNY Mellon, DBS, JP Morgan and MUFG.

MAS, on Thursday, announced the expansion of initiatives to scale asset tokenization for financial services. The city-state’s central bank has worked with 24 financial institutions over past two years under the Project Guardian, it noted.

The bank announced the successful completion of the first phase of the Global Layer One (GL1) initiative, which is an extension of the ambitious Project Guardian – involving 17 financial institutions.

The initiative has facilitated seamless cross-border transactions and trading of tokenized assets across liquidity pools.

“The GL1 initiative is an important next step to realize the potential of asset tokenization and reap efficiencies in capital markets,” Leong Sing Chiong, Deputy Managing Director of MAS noted.