New Important Ripple (XRP) Partnership Targets Banks and Institutional Clients

Ripple Labs and SettleMint have announced a strategic partnership that plugs Ripple Custody into SettleMint’s Digital Asset Lifecycle Platform (DALP), giving regulated financial institutions a single system to custody, issue and manage tokenized assets across their full lifecycle.

Announced from Singapore, the offering has already commenced in Asia, and the companies plan to extend it to other markets as institutional demand develops. Beyond banks, the stack targets market infrastructure operators and sovereign entities, adding compliance, settlement and servicing to the custody and issuance layer so institutions can drop separate vendors for each function.

“Financial institutions across Asia Pacific are putting digital assets to work. They are asking how to do more without stitching together separate solutions for custody, issuance and governance,” said Fiona Murray, Managing Director, Asia Pacific at Ripple.

The Very Lucrative Tokenization Market

The joint release cites Boston Consulting Group’s May 2026 report, “The Future of Digital Assets,” which describes the shift toward digital assets as a fundamental restructuring of financial infrastructure.

BCG projects that tokenized real-world assets could reach $88 trillion by 2035, and estimates that banks failing to adapt could see profits fall by as much as 30% over the same horizon. The release also names RLUSD, Ripple’s stablecoin, and the cryptocurrency XRP as assets underpinning the company’s solutions.

Elsewhere in the region, Ripple piloted RLUSD in Singapore’s central bank sandbox with supply chain finance firm Unloq in March, and its XRP Ledger featured in a cross-border pilot with JPMorgan, Mastercard and Ondo Finance that settled tokenized US Treasuries in under five seconds.

Custody Stack Assembled Through Deals

Ever since it was founded, Ripple has been selling payments, custody, liquidity and treasury infrastructure to banks and payment providers, and has assembled the custody line through a run of transactions. Moreover, Ripple has put its cumulative M&A and corporate venture spending on crypto infrastructure at around $4 billion.

Those include partnerships with Securosys and Figment, an integration with compliance analytics firm Chainalysis, and the acquisition of wallet infrastructure provider Palisade, which added MPC-based key sharding and multi-chain support.

SettleMint supplies the lifecycle side. Headquartered in Leuven, Belgium (though it has offices in the UAE, Singapore and Japan), the company stated that its composable DALP already runs in production and pre-production deployments across North America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia Pacific for banks, market operators and governments.

“Global capital markets are moving fully on-chain, and that shift only works when digital asset custody and lifecycle management operate as one system rather than two,” noted Adam Popat, CEO of SettleMint.