BNY and Payward — the entity behind the Kraken exchange — are in talks over a collaboration covering both digital assets and financial market infrastructure, according to people familiar with the matter. The report surfaced on Friday, October 2.
Under the potential deal, Payward Services — the B2B arm serving banks, exchanges, and asset managers — would bring a range of digital asset products to the table, spanning custody, wealth management, trading, payments, and infrastructure. Talks continue without any guarantee that a deal will take shape. Requests for comment directed at both BNY and Payward went unanswered by either organisation.
Documents framed the prospective collaboration along lines similar to the infrastructure component of Payward's recently concluded arrangement with Nasdaq. A $100 million commitment from Nasdaq Ventures to Payward was disclosed through a press release dated September 10, with the investment forming one element of a wider collaboration the two companies had been building together.
As part of that broader expansion, the two firms are set to advance jointly on the Nasdaq Equity Token (NET) framework while also putting a fresh market surveillance agreement in place. Funds directed toward this initiative are expected to advance the underlying architecture through which tokenised assets are traded and settled. The NET framework's planned token launches, scheduled for the second quarter of 2027, are intended to provide dedicated infrastructure for tokenised equities moving between different market environments.
On September 27, an interview with Payward Co-CEO Arjun Sethi aired on a prominent news channel, during which the company outlined plans to invest billions of dollars in building out its position as a provider of financial infrastructure. Acquisitions targeting futures, derivatives, and tokenized-stock platforms have absorbed considerable resources at Payward, which has also been working to broaden its banking access across the U.S. and Europe.
Payward's broader ambition centres on knitting together trading, banking, asset management, and corporate services into a single integrated financial platform, and the recent moves feed directly into that blueprint.
BNY views distributed-ledger technology as belonging within established financial infrastructure. The bank is building out operations at the convergence of conventional currency, tokenised assets, and blockchain networks, deepening a foothold in global capital markets it already occupies.
During BNY's second-quarter earnings call, chief executive Robin Vince outlined how payments, liquidity, collateral, digital assets, and securities markets are drawing closer together, a convergence he described as generating demand for infrastructure built around greater speed, certainty, and resilience. The company's leadership described the coming decade as a period in which financial services would encounter a defining opening, adding that BNY held a strong position to take the lead in that space.
