John O'Neill

Managing Director, Digital Assets & Currencies, CIB

HSBC

John has more than 20 years of experience in financial services. He is HSBC's Managing Director of Digital Assets and Currencies, responsible for the bank's approach to CBDCs, stablecoins, cryptocurrencies and asset tokenisation. John is responsible for HSBC Orion, the propriety digital assets platform that financial institutions and corporations are able to use to issue digital bonds on blockchain. Prior to joining HBSC, John held various roles at ICE Futures Europe (previously the London International Financial Futures Exchange – LIFFE), finally becoming head of the FICC business.

Speaking at

10:00–11:30amWed 24 JunGFTN InsightsRoundtable Room 2, Ground FloorOpen
Blueprint for Digital Assets

Tokenized Financial Markets: Advancing Trust, Integrity and Compliance

GFTN InsightsRoundtable Room 2, Ground FloorOpen
About this session

Tokenization is reshaping wholesale payments, foreign exchange, and securities. As adoption grows across platforms and jurisdictions, it introduces fragmentation, operational complexity, and coordination challenges that may affect liquidity, settlement certainty, and systemic stability.
This roundtable will examine the governance, control frameworks, and cross-border coordination needed to ensure trust, integrity, and resilience in tokenized financial markets. It will explore practical approaches to embed compliance, interoperability, and accountability, advancing trust in tokenization, and enabling it to scale.
4:00–5:30pmWed 24 JunGFTN InsightsRoundtable Room 2, Ground FloorOpen
Blueprint for Digital Assets

Digital Capital Markets: Taking the Stack On-Chain

GFTN InsightsRoundtable Room 2, Ground FloorOpen
About this session
The stock market is going on-chain. The NYSE-DTCC Russell 1000 pilot, the explosion of tokenized Treasuries past $11 billion, and a generation of on-chain private credit platforms are no longer proofs of concept - they are live infrastructure. The question has shifted from whether capital markets can tokenize to how fast the supporting stack - prime brokerage, custody, clearing, compliance, and investor access - can be rebuilt for on-chain settlement.
This roundtable convenes the architects of Digital Capital Markets to map where the infrastructure is genuinely ready, where legacy systems are the bottleneck, and what it will take to move emergent infrastructure from pilots to the primary issuance venue of choice. Participants will examine the impact of specific on-chain mechanics on the next generation stock market, including:
1. how T+0 atomic settlement changes margin and liquidity requirements
2. what fractionalisation does to price discovery and secondary market depth, and
3. whether the current generation of permissioned chain architectures can deliver the throughput and finality guarantees that institutional issuers actually require.
The session will also address the regulatory frontier - jurisdictional recognition of on-chain ownership, the status of tokenized securities under existing market structure rules, and where the gaps between MiCA, the GENIUS Act, and emerging APAC frameworks create opportunities for either arbitrage or paralysis.

Featured speakers

Hosted by

John O'Neill

Speaking at

Tokenized Financial Markets: Advancing Trust, Integrity and Compliance

Digital Capital Markets: Taking the Stack On-Chain