PwC Hong Kong has formed an alliance with TOKO Limited, a digital asset creation platform, to bring the benefits of tokenization technology to its clients. The collaboration comes amid efforts by the Hong Kong government to develop the city as a virtual assets hub.

As a tokenization engine, TOKO itself is a collaboration with DLA Piper, enabling the platform to provide technology services to complement the international law firm’s regulatory compliance capabilities.

According to PwC, tokenization transforms the process of finding and matching investors with investment opportunities, and the subsequent secondary market opportunities once an investment has been made.

The advantages of tokenization, such as the enforcement of immutable transactions, transparency and technological innovation, align with the firm’s strategy of building trust and delivering sustained outcomes, PwC says.

“Real world asset tokenization opens up exciting new opportunities for securities markets, for issuers and for investors,” says Duncan Fitzgerald, partner, PwC Hong Kong. “These opportunities include innovative programmable securities, cash flow advantages through the atomic settlement of trades, and enabling investment in otherwise illiquid assets through fractionalization.”

PwC Hong Kong partner Peter Brewin says the TOKO platform offers features that would benefit the firm’s clients. These include the ability to customize token attributes and data sets to fit a wide variety of different underlying asset classes, such as real estate, funds, intellectual property rights, digital art and trade finance.

The platform can also mint tokens on a variety of public blockchains, such as Ethereum, Polygon, Hedera, and Algorand. “At the same time, the platform can immutably bind backing legal documents and data files to the same token on a separate permissioned blockchain that maintains privacy and confidentiality by only making this information available to those that have been granted access,” Brewin adds.