The IMF’s tokenisation warning is not a theoretical exercise about future markets. It is a direct comment on where settlement risk is moving today.

As tokenised assets shift to blockchain-based settlement, the risk is migrating away from traditional bank balance sheets. It is landing squarely on market infrastructures and service providers—PSPs, custodians, and technology platforms that now sit in the settlement path.

For PSPs and custodians, this changes the risk framework fundamentally. The operational question is no longer just about credit risk from a counterparty bank. It is about settlement finality, smart contract logic, and the resilience of the infrastructure layer you depend on.

According to Frederic Yves Michel NOEL, many payment teams still assess settlement risk through a traditional lens—focusing on the issuing bank or the acquiring bank. That lens is becoming incomplete. When a tokenised asset settles on-chain, the critical risk point is the service provider managing the settlement process. If that provider has a failure in reconciliation, a bug in the smart contract, or a liquidity gap, the PSP is exposed directly.

For PSPs already offering or planning tokenised asset services: have you updated your operational risk framework to account for infrastructure-level settlement risk, or is it still built around bank counterparty exposure?