Europe’s largest asset manager Amundi and fast growing tokenized fund platform Spiko have launched the Spiko Amundi Overnight Swap Fund (SAFO), a tokenized UCITS fund designed for corporate treasury and collateral management. Spiko, which crossed $1 billion in assets under management in just 18 months, will act as transfer agent, tokenization platform and broker for the fund. Amundi, which manages €2.4 trillion ($2.8tn) in assets, serves as SAFO’s delegated investment manager.
SAFO works differently from a conventional money market fund. Rather than investing in government securities, the fund holds a portfolio of assets on behalf of a major bank. The bank pays the fund an agreed rate above risk free benchmarks and in return receives the investment returns on the portfolio. Banks are willing to pay this premium because holding assets on their own balance sheet is expensive due to regulatory capital requirements. For investors, the result is a yield above what a government Treasury bill fund would offer, backed by a contractual obligation from a globally significant bank plus collateral.
The arrangement uses a fully collateralized total return swap. BNP Paribas is the first counterparty providing a basket of US equities as collateral on which the bank earns the return. Spiko states that only global systemically important banks (G-SIBs) are eligible and names 14 approved banks including Société Générale, Crédit Agricole CIB, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Citi, Morgan Stanley, Barclays, UBS and HSBC, among others.
SAFO is available in four currencies with subscriptions starting from 1 EUR, USD, GBP or CHF. The shareholder register is hosted on Ethereum and Stellar, with plans to expand to additional networks. CACEIS acts as depositary bank and fund administrator, while Chainlink provides onchain NAV oracle infrastructure.
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