Three Banks. Three Strategies. One Race Mid-Tier Banks Are Losing
When people talk about who’s winning the digital assets race in wholesale banking, the conversation gravitates toward a handful of names. JPMorgan. Citi. Société Générale. The assumption is that size wins, that the firms with the largest balance sheets and the most engineers simply out-build everyone else.
That’s the wrong frame.
Looking closely at what Kinexys, Citi Token Services, and SG-FORGE are actually doing in 2026, a more interesting picture emerges. These three institutions aren’t competing on the same terrain. They’ve each made fundamentally different structural bets. And understanding why they diverged, and what it’s produced, is the most useful competitive intelligence available to any mid-tier bank trying to figure out where to move.
JPMorgan Kinexys: The Volume Play
JPMorgan’s trajectory is probably the most scrutinised in wholesale banking. What began as Onyx, one of the world’s first bank-operated blockchains, is now Kinexys, processing an average of more than $5 billion daily in tokenised movements, with cumulative notional transaction value exceeding $3 trillion since inception.
But the headline number obscures the strategic choice underneath it. Kinexys isn’t primarily a product innovation story. It’s an infrastructure ownership story. JPMorgan is building the rails and then running flows across them, JPM Coin for institutional payments, the Tokenised Collateral Network for margin and repo, the JLTXX tokenised Treasury fund for stablecoin reserve demand. The fund is structured to satisfy reserve asset requirements under the GENIUS Act, positioning it as a yield-bearing vehicle for stablecoin issuers seeking compliant Treasury exposure. 
The bet is network effects. Jamie Dimon’s annual letter in April 2026 warned that blockchain-based technologies, tokenisation, stablecoins, smart contracts, are direct competitors to traditional banking and could fundamentally change core functions like payments, trading and asset management. His response wasn’t to resist it. It was to own the infrastructure before competitors or non-bank players do.
For mid-tier banks, the implication is uncomfortable: if your institutional clients are JPMorgan clients too, some of their settlement flows are already moving across Kinexys rails. You’re not competing with JPMorgan. You’re becoming dependent on it.
Citi Token Services: The Client Orchestration Play
Citi has made a different bet. Where JPMorgan is building proprietary infrastructure, Citi is positioning itself as the bridge between worlds connecting clients’ existing treasury and trade operations to digital rails without forcing a wholesale infrastructure replacement.
Citi Token Services enabled a real-time treasury transformation at Siemens, providing support for near-instant funding and liquidity management and enabling cross-border transfers across more than 300 bank accounts in 40 currencies. That’s not a blockchain pilot. That’s a production transformation of a complex multinational treasury.
The strategic logic is built on Citi’s existing distribution scale. Citigroup is among major commercial banks planning to launch a tokenised deposit network in the first half of 2027, operated by The Clearing House, the real-time payment company co-owned by the same banks. And earlier this month, Citi expanded further into private markets with tokenised depositary receipts, with its first transaction between portfolio company Kaleido and investors within its Wealth business.
The common thread: Citi isn’t asking clients to move to new infrastructure. It’s embedding digital rails into existing client workflows. Citi expects tokenisation to concentrate in mainstream public markets, with parallel legacy and digital systems coexisting for years, giving an edge to large “structural orchestrators” that control both assets and payment rails.
Structural orchestrators. That phrase, from Citi’s own June 2026 tokenisation report, is the honest strategic self-description. Citi is building to be indispensable at the junction between old infrastructure and new.
For mid-tier banks, the lesson is different here. Citi’s play requires existing depth of client relationships across treasury, trade finance, and securities services. It’s not a model that can be replicated without that foundation — but the logic of it (meeting clients where they are, not asking them to move) is transferable.
SG-FORGE: The Infrastructure-as-Product Play
Société Générale’s approach is architecturally the most distinct of the three, and the most directly relevant to European mid-tier banks.
SG-FORGE was established as a dedicated digital assets subsidiary with a specific mandate: build end-to-end capabilities for issuing and managing digital-native financial products, and offer those capabilities to the market as a service.
In January 2026, SG-FORGE and Swift completed a landmark settlement of tokenised bonds in both fiat and digital currencies, using EUR CoinVertible, the first MiCA-compliant stablecoin natively compatible with Swift’s interoperability capabilities, which orchestrated flows across blockchain platforms and traditional systems. The transaction covered issuance, DvP settlement, coupon payments and redemption. End-to-end. On live infrastructure.
On 21 May 2026, SocGen announced plans to scale tokenised finance further and bring CoinVertible stablecoin solutions to the Canton Network. And the firm has been simultaneously expanding its US footprint, issuing its first digital bond in the American market, cleared through BNY Mellon, on Canton.
The SG-FORGE model says: we will be the issuing and settlement infrastructure that other institutions plug into. Not just for SocGen’s own balance sheet, for the market.
For mid-tier banks, this is the most instructive and the most threatening model simultaneously. SG-FORGE is, in effect, building the digital capital markets utility that smaller banks might have hoped would be a neutral industry utility. It isn’t. It’s a subsidiary of a competitor.
What All Three Have in Common — and What It Means
Strip back the product differences, and three patterns emerge across Kinexys, Citi, and SG-FORGE:
First, they subsidised years of losses to own the infrastructure decision. None of these platforms were profitable in their first three years. They were treated as strategic infrastructure spend, the digital equivalent of building a branch network. Mid-tier banks that framed digital assets as a cost centre to be minimised are now looking at competitor infrastructure that processes billions daily.
Second, they moved from experimentation to production in 2025-2026. The distinguishing characteristic of this year is not new announcements, it’s the shift from pilots to volume. Kinexys has processed over $3 trillion in cumulative notional value. DTCC is targeting initial production trades in July 2026 with a full service launch in October. These are operating businesses now, not innovation labs.
Third, they’re all positioning for the Pontes moment. With Pontes launching in Q3 2026 to connect DLT platforms to TARGET Services for settlement in central bank money, the question for every institution with tokenised asset exposure is whether their infrastructure is compatible. JPMorgan, Citi and SG-FORGE are all positioned to be. They’ve been building toward this interoperability layer for years.
What Mid-Tier Banks Should Do About It
The honest assessment is that there is no equivalent of Kinexys or SG-FORGE available to a mid-tier European bank to build independently. The capital, the engineering, and the multi-year tolerance for loss don’t exist at the same scale.
But that framing, build vs buy, is the wrong question. The right questions are:
Where are your clients already moving? HSBC, NatWest, Lloyds, Barclays, Nationwide and Santander ran a UK tokenised deposit pilot through mid-2026, covering payments on online marketplaces, re-mortgaging processes and digital asset settlements. Your clients’ settlement and collateral flows will increasingly touch infrastructure built by Tier-1 banks. Map that exposure now.
Which infrastructure do you partner with, and on whose terms? SG-FORGE, Euroclear’s D-FMI platform, SWIFT’s digital asset interoperability layer, these are available as services. Citi itself acted as dealer and issuing and paying agent when İşbank issued the first digitally native note using Euroclear’s D-FMI platform. Mid-tier banks can access production-grade infrastructure through these channels without building it. The risk is dependency and the erosion of client relationship ownership.
What is your Pontes readiness? This is the most time-sensitive question on the list. Q3 2026 is weeks away. If your wholesale DLT exposure hasn’t been assessed against Pontes compatibility, that assessment is overdue.
Where do you have domain advantage that Kinexys doesn’t? Client relationships in specific sectors, regulatory expertise in specific jurisdictions, collateral structures in specific asset classes, these are the terrains where mid-tier banks can compete without needing to out-build JPMorgan. The question is whether your digital assets strategy reflects those advantages, or whether it’s trying to replicate what the Tier-1s are doing, but later and with less capital.
Citi’s “Tokenization 2030” report, published this month, projects the tokenised asset market reaching $5.5 trillion by 2030, and explicitly identifies “structural orchestrators” as the institutions positioned to capture the largest share of that market.
The structural orchestrators are being built right now. Mid-tier banks have a narrowing window to decide whether they will be participants in that infrastructure, or dependent on it.
The difference between those two outcomes will be determined by decisions made in the next 12 months, not 2029.
Arth Intelligence provides strategic intelligence on digital assets, tokenisation and regulatory developments for wholesale financial institutions. Intelligence reports and advisory services available at arth-intelligence.com.
