Guest: Sandy Kaul, the executive Vice President, Head of Innovation at Franklin Templeton, where she leads the firm’s digital asset and blockchain initiatives.
In a nutshell: Franklin Templeton has gone “all-in” on blockchain, crypto, stablecoins, and tokenization as core parts of the future of financial infrastructure. But many advisors are still parroting the old talking points about these technologies: It’s a scam. It’s just for kids. There’s no real value.
On today’s show, Sandy Kaul breaks down the skepticism about digital assets and explains how major changes in regulations and the promise of “wallet-based” ecosystems are changing finance. Even if these assets aren’t right for all of your clients, they’re going to be attractive to a growing number of investors — including legacy financial institutions who will bring with them trustworthiness, stability, and even more public interest.
.Sandy Kaul and I discuss:
- The case for Bitcoin as “digital gold” and its place in a modern portfolio.
- How the underlying technology that makes Bitcoin and other digital assets possible creates its value.
- Why investing in DeFi could be an investment in the future of global bookkeeping.
- How wallet-based ecosystems could unify and simplify all of our financial assets.
- Stablecoins and their potential to ease large financial institutions onto the blockchain.
- How Franklin Templeton and other firms are educating their clients about digital assets and helping them invest.
Sandy Kaul on what advisors need to understand about blockchain technology:
“To really put this in perspective, we need to take a step back and understand how profoundly important these new technologies are. It’s easy to get caught up in the speculative nature of crypto investing and not understand that these are really true technology innovations. In fact, if these were offerings being made by companies instead of by protocols, we would be talking about the crypto craze just like we’re talking about the AI craze in terms of investment in technologies that are going to transform the future. And that’s really what crypto is. We are talking about ledgers that are now going to be shared and used by pretty much every company on earth over the coming decades. Just like the cloud completely transformed the way that companies manage their data, the underlying technologies that are being run by these big public blockchains are going to transform the way that people keep their records. And so I think the most important thing for advisors to start with in trying to understand the pivot that we’ve seen is that there are truly technology changes that underlie this whole new ecosystem, and giving access to those new technologies is part of what growth strategies are all about.”
Sandy Kaul on building safety and trust into wallet-based ecosystems:
“We needed rules and regulations to enable us to start really building consumer protections into a wallet-based system. And that is finally what we’re starting to see emerge in the U.S. is that regulatory framework, and certainty that is allowing us to now begin to really think about the optimal ways of operating in a wallet -based economy. We at Franklin Templeton have built our own token issuance and management platform. And we have built our own KYCAML-compliant wallet solution, and we enable wallet holders to make peer-to-peer transfers between any wallet set up in our system, upon their own choosing. And we can do that because we have demonstrated to the SEC that we have control over the tokens that sit in our wallets at all times. If somebody were to send a trade in error to the wrong wallet, we are able to call back that token or cancel the token if the wallet holder doesn’t want to release it, and reissue it. And this is why stablecoins are such an important new instrument, because it is going to allow the trusted players in the system to begin to issue wallet-based infrastructures. And unlike some early entrants, like crypto exchanges, these are trusted institutions that advisors have worked with for years. And knowing that they are building, and we are building, these protections into these wallet-based offerings, I think is going to be the linchpin that gets everyone comfortable. We can safely adopt these new technologies.”
Sandy Kaul on embracing change:
“ I would encourage everyone not to resist change. I remember being terrified and absolutely rejecting the idea that I would ever share my credit card information over the internet. I don’t think there’s anything I purchase right now that I’m not purchasing over the internet. Change happens. There were some bobbles early on in trying to establish this new system, but don’t judge the crypto ecosystem of 2025 on the crypto ecosystem of 2012. Realize how much institutionalization of this space has occurred. Understand that the regulatory environment is coming into clarity now that is going to allow for these investments to become more commonly offered. And make the effort to really understand that there is a tremendous growth business case and opportunity that sits under these potential investments.”
Resources Related to This Episode
- Sandy Kaul on LinkedIn
- The Digital Money Advisor Podcast During the last big wave of interest in Bitcoin and blockchain I had a series of conversations with advisors, academics, writers, and influencers about how this technology works and how it could transform global finance.
