Ripple has completed strategic investments in UK financial-technology firms ZILO and Licuido, extending its institutional capital-markets infrastructure on the XRP Ledger. The deals add transfer-agency, token-issuance and collateral-mobility capabilities around tokenized funds, building on existing technical relationships between the three companies. Ripple announced the investments on August 3 without disclosing their size or resulting ownership stakes.
The initiative targets operational gaps that remain after an asset is tokenized. Ripple is assembling a workflow that can record fund ownership, issue digital shares, move them as collateral and settle transactions atomically, with its dollar-backed RLUSD stablecoin intended to provide the cash side of delivery-versus-payment transactions.
ZILO Connects Traditional and Digital Fund Administration
ZILO has launched an integrated Digital Transfer Agency platform capable of managing conventional mutual-fund units and digitally native share classes within one system. The platform covers issuance, settlement, reconciliation, payments, corporate actions and regulatory reporting, reducing the need for asset managers and fund administrators to operate separate technology stacks for traditional and blockchain-based products.
The system also translates fund structures, share-class terms and jurisdictional rules into logic prepared for blockchain deployment. ZILO’s role is to maintain an authoritative ownership record as tokenized interests change hands, a requirement for subscriptions, redemptions, lending, margin and other regulated fund operations.
Licuido focuses on the next stage of the asset lifecycle. Its platform supports tokenization, distribution and secondary-market execution, while the Ripple investment will help scale its collateral marketplace on XRPL. The objective is to let eligible institutions pledge tokenized fund shares without first redeeming or selling the underlying investment, potentially reducing idle collateral and settlement delays.
Licuido has tested money-market-fund shares using XRPL’s Multi-Purpose Token standard, which supports issuer controls, transfer restrictions, metadata, freezing and clawback functions. Those features can help encode institutional eligibility and asset-management rules directly into a token issuance, although each fund still depends on its own legal structure and regulatory approvals.
Live Fund Launch Provides an Early Institutional Test
The investments follow Aviva Investors’ July launch of a tokenized share class for its US Dollar Liquidity Fund on XRPL. Licuido supplied tokenization infrastructure for the Central Bank of Ireland-approved structure, while the underlying traditional assets remained with BNY. That deployment gives Ripple and its partners a live example of the operational model they now plan to expand.
The regulatory position of Licuido also requires precision. Licuido Markets Limited operates as an appointed representative of Sapeno Partners LLP, which is authorized and regulated by the UK Financial Conduct Authority. Licuido is not directly FCA-authorized in its own name, even though its market activities operate under a regulated principal.
Ripple has not published deployment dates for the expanded ZILO and Licuido integrations or identified additional asset managers that will use them. The immediate development is an investment-backed infrastructure buildout rather than confirmation of broad institutional adoption. Its significance will depend on live issuance, collateral usage and RLUSD settlement volumes once the combined services move into production.