Taurus: Pioneering Tokenized Securities
Deutsche Bank-backed Taurus Receives Approval from FINMA for Tokenized Securities Offering
Taurus, a Swiss-based fintech company supported by Deutsche Bank, recently obtained approval from FINMA to provide tokenized securities to retail investors via the TDX marketplace. Co-Founder and Managing Partner Lamine Brahimi shared insights with CryptoSlate about the regulatory hurdles faced and overcome.
Since its establishment in April 2018, Taurus has focused on developing robust technology and processes tailored to institutional standards. Compliance, anti-money laundering protocols, and safeguarding investor interests were crucial to secure approval for facilitating secure, compliant, and accessible investment and trading of digital securities on TDX.
Brahimi envisions a future where tokenization simplifies the acquisition of company shares as effortlessly as buying books online. Despite the potential for digitizing private markets to revolutionize the financial sector, challenges such as global tokenization standards adoption, regulated secondary markets, and scalable tokenized cash solutions persist. Taurus tackles these barriers through strategic initiatives, including leading the Technology Committee of the Capital Markets & Technology Association in Switzerland, launching TDX, and expanding clients’ digital asset operations globally.
Collaborations with major banks like Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, and AMINA Bank have been pivotal to Taurus’s success. These partnerships prioritize cutting-edge technology and versatile asset management platforms. Despite the buzz around artificial intelligence, strong regulatory environments and client interest in tokenized assets remain high, with 80% of clients utilizing Taurus’s tokenization platform alongside custody solutions.
Looking forward, Brahimi anticipates increased tokenization adoption as regulatory frameworks mature and institutional engagement rises.
Taurus recently received approval from FINMA to offer tokenized securities to retail investors through the TDX marketplace. Can you walk us through the regulatory challenges you faced and how Taurus navigated the approval process? What impact do you think this development will have on democratizing access to these assets?
Since its inception in April 2018, Taurus has concentrated on developing a robust organization with institutional-grade technology and processes. The challenges were multiple and the standards were exceptionally high. We needed to demonstrate to the regulator and our auditors that Taurus met rigorous criteria in: technological and security readiness, compliance, anti-money laundering measures, and investor protection.
This allows retail, professional, and institutional investors to access, invest, and trade the full spectrum of digital securities accepted on TDX in a secure and compliant manner.
You’ve expressed a vision of making it as easy to buy a share of a company as it is to purchase a book on Amazon. Can you elaborate on the potential impact of tokenization on traditional financial markets? What are the key barriers to widespread adoption, and how is Taurus working to overcome them?
Taurus’s core belief is that private markets (private equity, private debt, and other real asset classes) should be digitized to make the digital asset industry a deca-trillion. Why? Because their infrastructure is still mostly paper-based, unlike public markets which are already electronic.
Regulation is increasingly constructive but the main barriers to widespread adoption that I see are (i) adoption of global tokenization standards (ii) regulated secondary markets (iii) mega custodians entering in the space (iv) large scale tokenized cash solutions beyond USD i.e., in EUR, CHF, GBP, Yen etc. to have both the securities leg and cash leg onchain.
We have taken modest but concrete actions to address these challenges. Among them, Taurus chairs the Technology Committee (Dr. Jean-Philippe Aumasson) of the Capital Markets & Technology Association (CMTA) in Switzerland. This group is in charge of defining standards for tokenization (CMTAT) and custody to facilitate distributed ledger technology adoption. We also launched TDX, one of the first regulated marketplaces globally, to increase liquidity for tokenized securities. We are also helping some of our largest clients scale their digital asset business across the globe.
Taurus has formed strategic partnerships with several prominent banks, including Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, and AMINA Bank. What motivated these collaborations, and what challenges have you faced in integrating traditional finance with crypto? How do you envision these partnerships evolving in the future?
When banks consider entering the digital asset space, they often take into account two main dimensions:
- Banks want a future-proof technology partner. The risk of technology obsolescence—in a fast-paced innovation environment, is high. Therefore it is critical to choose a technology provider that controls the full technology stack, including the most complex cryptography, software, hardware, distributed systems, systems. This is exactly what we managed to build at Taurus.
- They also want a platform that allows them to manage any digital assets, beyond cryptocurrencies ie., tokenized assets (any type), digital currencies etc. Taurus has been the first provider that enabled clients to manage any digital asset on both public and permissioned blockchains.
Despite the AI hype, the future looks solid as regulation is increasingly constructive in most key financial centers and client demand for innovative digital asset products increase. 80% of our clients are now using our tokenization platform in addition to our custody solution. We are working on landmark transactions in the areas of tokenized funds, cash, and debt. Stay tuned.
You have a unique background, having worked in both traditional finance and the crypto industry. What motivated your transition into the crypto space, and how has your experience in traditional finance influenced your approach at Taurus?
I was educated as an engineer at EPFL in Switzerland. I switched to business but it happened that I was leading the digital transformation of the Bank I served prior to founding Taurus so I was always close to what was new in financial markets. To make a long story short, one day in 2016, I was asked to make an introduction about blockchain and bitcoin to some clients and that was a revelation.
My fellow co-founders and I always believed that distributed ledger technologies will increasingly and positively impact our economy, starting with financial markets whose infrastructure was designed decades ago and that ultimately, traditional assets and digital assets will be managed ubiquitously.
That’s why we officially launched Taurus in 2018. The available infrastructure did not meet our needs nor those of banks, which we knew very well. So, we started building it from the ground up – and with a lot of hard work and some luck we made ourselves a name in the industry.
Taurus has been at the forefront of tokenization efforts, working with various Swiss companies to tokenize their assets. Can you share some success stories or challenges you’ve encountered in this process? How do you envision the tokenization landscape evolving in the coming years?
There are many. Some include trade finance transactions that we tokenized end-to-end with Horizon Capital and SCCF, Luxembourg and Swiss-based trade finance experts.
Another example is our collaboration with Cité Gestion, which was the first private bank in the world to tokenize its shares. Another success story is our work with Qoqa, a community-based e-commerce company with close to 1 million clients, where we helped them raise CHF 1 million in just 22 minutes for their community-owned project. We helped Qoqa issue equity tokens, representing ownership shares in the subsidiary, and helped their community members become direct stakeholders in the project.
Looking ahead, we envision tokenization becoming mainstream in the private capital markets. As regulatory frameworks solidify and institutional adoption increases, we expect to see a surge in tokenized real-world assets. This will lead to greater liquidity, fractional ownership opportunities, and more efficient trading of traditionally illiquid assets. Our partnerships with companies like Swissroc in real estate and SCCF in trade finance are just the beginning. I look forward to our partnership with large custodians – you will soon see tokenized funds in the market and on TDX.
