ZILO unifies fund admin and digital assets with Ripple backing

ZILO, the London-based fund administration technology company, has launched what it describes as the first platform to unify traditional mutual fund transfer agency operations with full digital asset capabilities in a single, integrated system. Alongside the launch, Ripple, the enterprise blockchain infrastructure group behind the XRP Ledger, has made a strategic investment in ZILO and will use the platform to serve its own institutional client base in digital capital markets.

The announcement marks a meaningful structural shift in how large asset managers and fund administrators may approach the persistent divide between legacy fund operations and the tokenised asset infrastructure that is increasingly being demanded by institutional clients.

Bridging two parallel infrastructures

For the past several years, the industry has maintained two separate technology stacks: one for traditional mutual fund settlement, reconciliation, corporate actions, and regulatory reporting; another for minting, tokenising, and settling digital or tokenised assets on distributed ledger infrastructure. Running both in parallel adds operational cost, introduces reconciliation risk, and slows time-to-market when asset managers want to launch new structures or adapt existing ones to changing regulatory requirements.

ZILO's platform collapses that architecture. Fund structures, share classes, and jurisdictional compliance rules are configured through a no-code interface, which the platform translates into on-chain logic without requiring institutions to rely on developer resources. The system tracks legal ownership in real time across both asset types, enabling full lifecycle visibility through collateral, margin, repo, and treasury workflows. Phil Goffin, Founder and CEO of ZILO, put it plainly: "The future of fund administration is not a choice between traditional and digital; it is the seamless integration of both."

The Ripple partnership extends this reach considerably. Ripple's growing roster of institutional clients in digital capital markets gains access to a Digital Transfer Agency solution that sits natively on the XRP Ledger, while ZILO gains distribution into a network of financial institutions already operating in blockchain-based capital markets infrastructure.

Capital flows and the convergence macro

The strategic investment by Ripple, though undisclosed in size, fits a broader capital pattern worth watching. Enterprise blockchain infrastructure groups are increasingly making downstream investments in the institutional tooling layer: the settlement engines, registry systems, and compliance platforms that determine whether tokenised finance scales beyond pilots. Ripple's move into ZILO follows a similar logic to the investment activity seen around other institutional digital-asset infrastructure plays, where the underlying ledger provider backs the application layer to accelerate adoption.

For cross-sector investors, the implications extend beyond the fintech silo. Asset managers overseeing multi-asset portfolios that include tokenised real estate, infrastructure debt, or private credit now have a clearer pathway to a single operational framework. The ability to bring a tokenised product to market without writing custom code, and to adapt it as MiCA or equivalent regulatory regimes evolve, removes a significant barrier to the institutionalisation of digital assets in European and GCC markets.

There is also a geopolitical read-across. Jurisdictions competing for digital asset business, including the UAE, Singapore, and the UK, are watching the infrastructure layer closely. A London-founded platform that is ledger-agnostic at the configuration level but partners with a US-headquartered blockchain infrastructure group for its first major strategic tie-up illustrates how the market is consolidating around interoperability rather than single-ledger bets. For sovereign wealth managers and family offices now allocating to tokenised private markets, the maturation of the transfer agency layer is the unglamorous but decisive infrastructure question that determines whether those allocations can actually be serviced at scale.

ZILO was founded in April 2020 and says its client base now includes systemically important global financial institutions, though it does not name them publicly. The company's next challenge will be demonstrating that its configuration-led approach can absorb the jurisdictional complexity of multi-market fund launches without the bespoke engineering overhead that has historically limited rival platforms.