Broadridge's Rob Krugman: tokenized repo heading to $1 trillion a day by year end

Repo moves from overnight to intraday as volumes race toward $1 trillion

Rob Krugman, Chief Digital Officer at Broadridge, corrected the show's figure to say the firm is now settling $380 billion a day in tokenized repo, and expects that to approach $1 trillion by the end of the calendar year. He attributed the growth to more banks joining the ecosystem and recognizing the efficiency of moving from overnight loans to intraday ones. Broadridge recently announced a DLX solution that already supports 18 different blockchains and is, in Krugman's words, chain-agnostic.

He explained that repo is fundamentally an overnight loan banks give each other to maintain capital on hand, and tokenization lets that loan be broken into much smaller time windows, cutting interest costs and improving capital efficiency. He said the cash leg of these transactions is shifting from fiat to stablecoins, deposit tokens and money markets, and that any tokenized asset — not just treasuries — can eventually serve as collateral.

On programmability, Krugman said smart contracts can embed regulatory obligations like KYC, AML and OFAC checks directly into assets, and can also define how an asset may be lent, to whom, and for how long. He pointed to Broadridge's governance business — proxy voting and corporate action distributions — as another function that could be codified and even sold or distributed independently.

Composability across ledgers and the push to connect TradFi with onchain infrastructure

Krugman described the challenge of merging onchain activity with the "TriFi" world of regulated institutions. Broadridge's infrastructure runs about 300 million accounts in North America for settlement, clearing, books and records. Rather than expecting firms to rebuild all downstream services, Broadridge offers what he called a turnkey solution: connectivity to new trading venues, wallet and custody infrastructure (via a qualified custodian or self-custody), and integration of onchain data into existing books and records.

He called 2027 "the year of the unlock," saying every broker-dealer globally is now thinking about rolling out wallet and custody infrastructure.

"If the only people who can buy it... are the 750 million people globally that are active in crypto, that would be a shame."

— Rob Krugman. He argued that turning on brokerage and banking industries unlocks tokenized assets for billions of people, often without them realizing they're interacting with tokens at all.

Asked about the scale of fees generated across the $13 trillion-per-day repo industry, Krugman said he did not have a precise revenue figure, but framed the opportunity as that $13 trillion potentially becoming $100 trillion or $150 trillion as more collateral types — money markets, tokenized equities, tokenized funds — are added.

Consumers and emerging markets as the biggest winners

Krugman drew a parallel to the 1990s shift to online trading, when trades fell from $150 to $10 and every bank created an online division. He said the limiting factor today is less about technology and more about regulatory clarity and competitive FOMO, noting some firms had hoped the Clarity Act would pass. He said DTCC, NASDAQ, the London Stock Exchange and Deutsche Börse are already embracing tokenization, pushing others to follow.

Asked who wins as tokenization scales, Krugman said:

"I think who wins out of this, it's going to be the consumer."

— Rob Krugman. He cited the London Stock Exchange Group's plan to tokenize its top 100 companies as opening foreign-market access to US investors, and said tokenization could cut private market entry points from roughly a million dollars to a few thousand for accredited investors.

He also described a Nigerian student's proposal, developed in a project with Cornell, to pay workers in US dollar-backed stablecoins instead of local currency that is costly to convert, calling US-backed stablecoins and tokenized treasuries potentially "the biggest trading event" in American history. He did not give a timeline for when traditional infrastructure might be fully replaced, saying only that he expects the shift to begin "by 2030."