Financial markets have historically operated according to the schedules of exchanges, banks, and settlement systems. Clients have built their funding, investment, and collateral processes around these fixed operating windows, with collateral calls, settlements, and decision-making concentrated during business hours.
Digital assets are changing these expectations. Tokenised funds, digital cash, and tokenised securities can move almost continuously, creating the possibility for clients to mobilise assets more quickly, access liquidity when needed, and respond to market events outside traditional market hours.
For State Street, the challenge is not simply extending operating hours. Clients still need the safety, oversight, and controls that underpin institutional markets.
The objective is therefore to build digital infrastructure that allows traditional and tokenised assets to work together seamlessly, delivering greater flexibility without increasing operational risk.
In the nearer term, this may be experienced as a 23/5 operating model, providing near-continuous weekday access while maintaining a controlled window for reconciliation, maintenance, and resilience.
For collateral, the focus is on helping clients move collateral faster, optimise asset usage and access liquidity more efficiently, while ensuring that the people, processes, and governance supporting these activities remain robust.
Collateral is a strong use case because margin obligations can arise quickly, while eligible assets may sit across custodians, markets, and legal entities. A tokenised money market fund (MMF) or government bond could theoretically be pledged at any hour, but it still requires custody, valuation, eligibility assessment, haircuts, concentration checks, settlement evidence, and reporting. Tokenisation can improve mobility, transparency, and programmability, but the token does not remove these obligations.
The State Street Digital Asset Platform brings together custody, tokenisation, compliance, digital cash, wallet management, blockchain connectivity, data services, reporting, and analytics. Collateral+ connects collateral operations, custody, funding, and optimisation across custodial networks. Together, these capabilities aim to link the digital representation of an asset with the institutional processes that make it acceptable as collateral.
The business and operational impact
For collateral operations, 23/5 changes the operating model from a sequence of regional business days into a near-continuous service. Work can no longer depend on one team completing every stage before its local close.
Handover between regions becomes a core control, with clear ownership of open margin calls, substitutions, settlement exceptions, and unresolved eligibility issues. The daily maintenance window must also be planned so that critical activity is not left without support.
Operations teams would spend less time initiating routine movements manually and more time supervising automated workflows, resolving exceptions, and confirming that digital and traditional records remain aligned. Smart contract-driven eligibility checks and substitutions can accelerate processing, but exceptions still require accountable human review. Procedures must therefore define when automation may proceed, when an item is stopped, who can override a rule, and how that decision is recorded.
Reconciliation also becomes more continuous. A distributed ledger may provide an immutable transaction record, but internal books, custody records, valuation sources, clearing systems, and client reporting must still agree. A hybrid model is therefore likely to remain important for the foreseeable future, with digital networks and traditional books and records operating together rather than one immediately replacing the other. Operations need timely visibility of transaction status, failed movements, asset encumbrance, and available inventory. The practical benefit is faster collateral mobilisation; the operational challenge is managing it safely across time zones and systems.
For finance and treasury functions, more mobile collateral can improve the use of liquidity and high-quality liquid assets. Near-real-time information on inventory, funding requirements, and margin calls can support earlier decisions on whether to deliver cash, conventional securities, tokenised securities, or tokenised fund units. The benefit is a broader, more visible inventory set and more timely allocation decisions across both traditional and digital assets.
Finance controls must expand to cover the full digital lifecycle. Accounting treatment, valuation, income, fees and balance sheet classification must remain consistent whether an instrument is tokenised, represented by an underlying traditional asset, or digitally native.
Finance teams need a common data model so that digital positions do not become a separate ledger that is difficult to reconcile with the general ledger, fund accounting, and client books.
Look-through information for tokenised MMFs remains important because haircuts and eligibility should reflect the underlying risk rather than only the digital wrapper. This is not unique to tokenisation, but digital structures make consistent data and transparency across the wrapper and underlying assets even more important.
Treasury functions and collateral optimisation become more closely connected. Forecasting tools can identify upcoming margin requirements and recommend suitable inventory based on eligibility, liquidity, funding cost, and concentration limits. This can improve liquidity planning, widen the usable inventory view and support earlier funding decisions.
Risk and compliance functions must also monitor cyber, anti-money laundering (AML), Know Your Customer (KYC), counterparty and network risks, alongside established market and operational risks.
The additional control investment is therefore part of the value proposition: faster movement is paired with faster evidence, clearer escalation, and stronger oversight.
Software will move from batch-based, market-specific processing toward event-driven and near-real-time architecture. A margin call, valuation update, eligibility change, or settlement confirmation will trigger the next controlled action without waiting for a scheduled end-of-day file.
Where full real-time processing is not yet possible, software will make the boundary visible and manage queues safely through the 23/5 operating window.
State Street’s solution is designed to connect collateral across traditional custody networks, private distributed ledger technology (DLT) environments, and public permissioned networks through integration layers and standard interfaces.
These connections bring together Collateral+, the Digital Asset Platform, custodians, triparty agents, clearing venues, order management systems, and finance platforms.
A common asset and transaction model gives each system a consistent view of the position, owner, valuation, restriction, and settlement status, allowing the same collateral journey to be controlled across multiple networks.
State Street is addressing this by moving eligibility schedules, haircuts, concentration limits, substitution logic, and approval thresholds from manual procedures into configurable, controlled rules and, where appropriate, smart-contract logic.
The solution combines these rules with version control, approval workflows, effective dates, testing, and an auditable record of every automated decision. This allows a rule to be changed once and applied consistently across channels while preserving accountable review and governance.
Resilience and exception management are designed into the platform. A 23/5 service requires monitoring across regions, clear alerts, idempotent processing to prevent duplicate movements, recovery from partial failures, and controlled maintenance windows.
Dashboards distinguish business exceptions from technical failures and show who owns the next action. Human override is limited, permissioned, and fully recorded.
Security and identity controls operate across wallets, users, legal entities, and networks. Software enforces segregation of duties, role-based access, transaction limits, and approval policies while supporting AML and KYC requirements. Data lineage connects the token to the underlying asset, custody account, valuation source, and collateral agreement, creating the evidence needed for operations, finance, clients, auditors, and regulators.
The transition to digital collateral should begin with the problems clients and operating teams need to solve, then apply the technology to clearly defined journeys. Priorities may include mobilising tokenised MMF units, processing substitutions more quickly, and meeting intraday margin calls during periods of liquidity pressure.
Each journey needs an agreed operating owner, finance treatment, eligibility model, technology integration, exception path, and control evidence.
Early-adopter programmes can then test whether the end-to-end process works across normal activity, market stress, and system failure scenarios.
Success should be assessed not only by whether a token moves, but by whether the asset is available when needed, the movement settles correctly, books and records remain aligned, exceptions are resolved promptly, and the client receives reliable reporting. These foundations are necessary for a controlled move from conventional processing toward 23/5 and potentially, over time, broader 24/7 collateral mobility.
The role of Collateral+ and the Digital Asset Platform
Collateral+ provides the collateral workflow, inventory, funding, and optimisation layer, while the Digital Asset Platform provides digital custody, tokenisation, wallet, compliance, and blockchain connectivity.
The strategic value comes from integration between them. Analytics can identify a requirement and suitable asset; controlled digital infrastructure can then support mobilisation; and custody, accounting, and reporting services can record the outcome. Integration with platforms can further connect onboarding, workflow, and order management. The objective is not a blockchain-only operating model, but a hybrid architecture in which tokenised and traditional assets use common controls and data.
This is particularly important for institutional clients that require segregated custody, auditable records, formal governance, and detailed reporting.
Tokenisation is reshaping the entire operating model. It enables operations teams to focus on continuous oversight and exception management; provides finance and treasury with more timely and integrated insights; extends established risk and compliance controls into digital environments; and drives the shift towards event-driven, interoperable, and resilient technology platforms.
A 23/5 model is a practical transition from global support to global settlement. Today, State Street can support collateral activity across regions and time zones, but the underlying assets, cash, and market infrastructures used for settlement are not always available continuously.
To bridge this gap, State Street is bringing together Collateral+, the Digital Asset Platform, custody, digital cash, common data, and global operations.
This integrated model enables collateral to be mobilised, transferred, and managed more seamlessly across markets and time zones, moving beyond simply supporting activity to facilitating settlement itself.
By increasing the mobility and programmability of collateral while maintaining institutional controls, governance, and trust, State Street is helping create the foundations for a future global settlement model.
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