Singapore's tokenised settlement programme has added retail fund distributors to a pilot previously limited to banks and asset managers, extending the test to subscription and redemption at the point of sale.

Distributors handle the reconciliation burden that tokenisation is meant to remove: matching orders, cash movements and unit registers across systems that settle on different cycles. Compressing that to same-day settlement is the pilot's stated objective.

Participants say the technical work is largely solved and the constraint is legal. Unit registers remain the statutory record, and until the tokenised representation is recognised as that record, firms must maintain both.

The authority has indicated it will consult on the necessary amendments after the pilot reports, which participants read as a signal that the programme is expected to graduate rather than quietly conclude.