Franklin Templeton CEO Jenny Johnson has a clear explanation for why large financial institutions are slow to embrace blockchains: the technology destroys their revenue streams.
Speaking at the Proof of Talk conference in Paris, Johnson – who manages $1.74 trillion in assets at Franklin Templeton – he told the audience that the criticism of the financial players is not related to technical skepticism.
It’s about protecting the business model. Banks and middlemen who collect a transaction fee for each installment of the transaction lose that fee when a smart contract can do the same job at a lower cost.
Johnson pointed to Franklin Templeton’s tokenized money market fund, Benji, as a concrete example of the price gap. Making 50,000 trades through the company’s trading platform costs $1.30 per transaction. The same volume processed on the Stellar blockchain came in at $1.13 per transaction – a significant reduction at the institutional level.
The announcement came as Franklin Templeton to be revealed The new agreement with MoonPay, designed to allow institutional investors to move between stablecoins and solid tokenized funds through a chain workflow.Franklin Templeton’s push into the digital economy is one of the most aggressive moves by the wealth manager in the history of the company. The California-based company, which manages about $1.74 trillion in assets, began creating its own dedicated financial team in 2018 – years before tokenization became a big deal among players.
Franklin Templeton’s bitcoin and crypto push
Benji was launched in 2021 as the first US-registered fund in the world to use public blockchain as its official system for processing transactions and recording share ownership. The fund invests mostly in US Treasury securities and uses blockchain for efficiency rather than crypto exposure.
The face of bitcoin, Franklin Templeton he started The Franklin Bitcoin ETF (ticker: EZBC), a product that only holds bitcoins and cash, is designed for investors who want direct exposure to prices without managing savings.
The company also offers separately managed bitcoin/ethereum trading for investors who want to diversify among major digital assets.
In April 2026, Franklin Templeton he announced plans to acquire 250 Digital, from the crypto venture company CoinFund, to create a new group called Franklin Crypto to implement cryptocurrency operations at the institutional level.
The deal itself broke new ground – BENJI tokens were used as part of the investment, making it one of the first M&A transactions made on the chain. The company’s financial services division manages approximately $1.8 billion in assets.
