The European Commission and the Association of German Banks have co-founded an initiative on the importance of tokenisation with the support of the management consultancy Roland Berger and the participation of over 20 member organisations from France, Germany, Portugal, Italy, Liechtenstein, Sweden and Spain.

Key findings and the Worldine perspective:

Europe must become more attractive for digital business models to strengthen European competitiveness.

A successful token economy has the potential to create new services and business models in many industries. However, the importance of tokenisation for Europe, i.e. the transfer of real assets (digital or otherwise) to the blockchain, is generally underestimated.

In the context of this report, a token represents an asset in a digital form combined with information and assignable digital rights. The token is a reference (i.e. identifier) that maps back to sensitive data through a tokenisation system and can represent either tangible physical assets or intangible assets that themselves only exist in digital form.

How can tokenisation change our lives?

Thanks to the breakthrough of distributed ledger (e.g. blockchain) technology, tokenisation has spread in many areas and can cover lots of use cases like paying with a digital car wallet, stable coins or future digital Euro, creating digital twin and Digital ID, securing M2M communication.

Simple regulatory framework and more digital know-how can boost innovation

Worldline and peer field experts are collaborating to create an interoperable trusted layer to enable all the truly digitised and automated services we have been expecting, allowing Europe to master its services and ideally lead the industry forward.

Thanks to its long technological experience and expertise in transaction and payment management, including complex, security and regulatory constraints, Worldline is ideally placed to support industry players, banks, public institutions, transport operators and others, unleashing for them the token economy, thereby improving the transparency, safety and efficiency of all their transactions.

Europe must succeed in fully exploiting the potential of tokenisation in the coming years. Introducing a token economy to financial markets would lead to greater efficiency, increased security and trust, while significantly reducing cost and complexity.