DFNS and Ownera have signed a Memorandum of Understanding establishing a strategic partnership and joint go-to-market initiative focused on one of the few tokenization use cases institutional markets already need at scale: collateral mobility and intraday financing. Under the partnership, DFNS becomes a founding member of Ownera’s Open Collateral Network, brings a live application to Ownera’s SuperApps ecosystem, and the two companies will jointly market an integrated solution: tokenized cash, funds, and securities held in DFNS-governed wallets, mobilized across intraday repo, margin, and collateral optimization workflows.
Ownera moves assets between institutions. DFNS governs what happens inside them. Tokenized markets need both, and until now institutions have had to assemble them from pieces never designed to fit.
Ownera, the orchestration layer for tokenized markets
Ownera is the UK fintech behind FinP2P, the open-source application orchestration protocol for financial markets, and a global leader in digital asset interoperability. The premise is as old as the internet’s own plumbing. Onchain finance needs a standardized layer that lets institutions connect once and transact with every other participant rather than building a bespoke bilateral integration for every counterparty, custodian, and ledger. FinP2P routers orchestrate transactions across any blockchain, legacy ledger, or network, with atomic settlement across chains and asset classes, and today they orchestrate around $5 billion in monthly trading volume between counterparties and their regulated service providers such as custodians, broker-dealers, transfer agents, cash providers, and lenders.
The intraday repo solution is operating in production, and its tokenized collateral and margin capabilities have been validated through leading industry initiatives involving more than seventy institutions. That is the platform this partnership plugs into.
Why collateral is where tokenization gets real
Collateral moves between institutions every day in enormous volume, supporting derivatives, securities financing, and capital markets transactions, and margin calls arrive across time zones and outside settlement windows. The machinery behind it is fragmented by design: cash on one system, securities on another, a margin engine that talks to neither, and settlement that takes a day when the exposure it covers changes by the hour. The cost is capital that sits idle to cover timing risk, and operations teams reconciling across systems never meant to interoperate.
Tokenization fixes the timing. Interoperability fixes the fragmentation. But each institution still has to answer the questions its regulators ask about every movement: Which assets may leave? Under whose approval? Locked against which obligation? And how will it prove all of that afterward? That is the layer this partnership adds.
What DFNS brings
DFNS is the core banking platform for digital assets, and in this partnership it provides the operating layer inside each institution on the network. Secure key management and node management across the chains the collateral lives on. Programmable policies enforced so a collateral movement clears approval quorums, limits, and allowlists before anything signs. Identity and access management, with every action signed by a credential and recorded. Treasury tooling for balances across networks. And full transaction lifecycle management, from construction to confirmation, with the audit trail a supervisor will accept.
Two primitives we shipped this year were built for exactly this kind of workflow:
- Vaults give an institution a balance sheet rather than a balance: available, locked, and incoming states, each decomposing into entries tied to the operation that created them.
- Locks let a counterparty reserve funds inside your vault without moving them, under rules neither side can bend: nothing locks without your approval, nothing unlocks without the counterparty’s, and nothing unwinds it from the side. Collateral posted against a repo or a margin call is a lock. A margin increase is a lock increase, routed through your approval. Settlement at close is a transfer drawn against the lock, atomically, across the network. The collateral never left your custody, and the record shows exactly which assets secured which obligation at every moment of the term.
Together, the two companies aim to deliver the complete collateral lifecycle: inventory management, margin calls, collateral optimization, atomic settlement, and lifecycle management, spanning the network between institutions and the controls within them.
A founding role, and where it goes next
DFNS joins the Open Collateral Network as a Founding Member and will feature a live application within Ownera’s SuperApps ecosystem, so institutions on the network can reach DFNS-governed collateral workflows without new integration work. The companies will also explore deeper platform integration, including the potential embedding of Ownera’s collateral management capabilities as a native feature within the DFNS platform, which would let a DFNS institution reach the FinP2P network from the platform it already operates.
The joint go-to-market focuses on the institutions for whom collateral mobility and intraday financing have become urgent: hedge funds, asset managers, insurance companies, corporate treasuries, exchanges, and market infrastructure providers.
Get started
- Learn more about Ownera: ownera.io
- Learn more about onchain core banking: dfns.co
- Explore the platform and documentation: docs.dfns.co
- Talk to our team about collateral mobility: sales@dfns.co