Report – From Custody to Capability: How financial institutions move from digital asset ambition to scalable services

We are pleased to share our latest report “From Custody to Capability: How financial institutions move from digital asset ambition to scalable services”. Through interviews with executives across Zodia, we examine what institutions are discovering as they move digital asset strategies from proof of concept into production, and what it takes to operate digital asset services at institutional scale.

Key themes include:

• Why nearly nine in ten institutions have allocated budget to digital assets, but only one in six has reached production. What sits in the gap between committed spend and live infrastructure?
• The five reasons institutional digital asset programmes stall, from weak commercial cases, to operating model immaturity, skills gaps, pilots that don’t survive contact with real volumes, and cost curves that arrive before revenue.
• What “production-ready” actually means and the five tests a digital asset initiative has to pass before it counts: demonstrable commercial value, scale beyond the pilot, regulatory and stakeholder alignment, institutional-grade trust, and full integration with core financial infrastructure.
• What banks ask for once custody is in place, such as staking, lending, off-exchange settlement, collateral management, repo, stablecoin infrastructure and RWA tokenisation, and why each one changes the infrastructure decisions made today.
• A 12-point implementation handbook with practical action points covering the business case, operating model design, build-versus-buy, stakeholder sequencing and how to measure success on commercial outcomes rather than pilot completion.

Download the report now!