From banking to blockchain infrastructure, CEO Adam Popat has led tokenisation as it moves from experiment to institutional reality. After leading digital assets at Standard Chartered, he took the top job at SettleMint. Now with a landmark Ripple partnership bringing custody, issuance, and lifecycle management together, he joins Rachel Pether at the ADX. Adam, welcome to the show.
Thank you very much for having me.
You stepped into the CEO role at SettleMint after years at Standard Chartered, where you led its push into digital assets. What convinced you to leave TradFi?
Pure conviction — conviction in the team and the technology being built. I got to know the co-founders over a number of years. And also conviction in the market moment. I could see from within Standard Chartered that the adoption of blockchain technology across financial and capital markets was going to take off in a big way. So it was a very easy transition for me.
This week, Ripple and SettleMint announced a landmark deal. Tell us about that.
We are super excited about that partnership. I have personally been working with Ripple for ten years. We see them as real leaders in this space. What we have done is fully integrate their custody platform with our digital asset lifecycle management platform. It gives large institutions one single system — to issue, manage the lifecycle of assets, and custody them, all through one single pane of glass. You do not need to jump between systems. You have just got one system to manage the whole thing. This is really the first in the market, and we are very excited about it.
What does that concretely mean for a bank integrating with this?
It takes a lot of complexity out. You only need to really integrate one system, and that system speaks to all the other systems it needs to within the bank. It halves the complexity. And then it helps businesses, IT teams, compliance teams, and audit teams manage everything happening on chain through one interface.
You have described SettleMint as a pure tech provider to regulated institutions — not an issuer. Why has that positioning mattered?
Our vision has always been that this is going to be a critical function for banks — and they are going to want the tools to do this themselves. They are not ultimately going to want to rely on a third party, often a small tokenisation company, to do tokenisation for them. They want one system that talks to all their internal systems, where they can issue, manage lifecycle, and custody digital assets. We have stuck true to that vision and we are starting to see it play out.
BlackRock, JPMorgan — they are all building tokenisation infrastructure now. How does a specialist provider compete?
We are not looking to compete with JPMorgan. There is no way. It is one of the world's largest, most successful banks. We are a small technology provider. But we have been building in this space for ten years, and we have a real leading tech stack here. We look to partner — to make it easy for other banks who maybe do not want to make the huge investments needed to build this technology, or more importantly, to maintain and continuously develop it over time. We partner with them so they can focus on the business.
SettleMint is celebrating its tenth anniversary. What has stayed the same and what has changed?
We are really proud to celebrate ten years. Not many companies that started in this game ten years ago can say they are still here, let alone thriving. What has not changed is our vision — we have stuck in a very disciplined way to supporting large, often regulated institutions. That has been consistent throughout. What has changed is obviously the product. It has evolved significantly. We have pivoted and are now really focused on lifecycle management — which is a lot easier to say than it is to do.
Thank you so much for joining us today, Adam.
Thank you very much for having me again.
