Aviva Investors has launched a tokenised share class of its Sterling Liquidity Fund on the XRP Ledger, putting £50m of its own money into the vehicle. The launch went live on October 26, 2026. It follows the firm's first tokenised offering, a dollar liquidity fund share class that started in July 2026. Across both the sterling and dollar tokenised classes, Aviva now reports more than £86m invested.
The move gives the asset manager an on-chain presence for a product that has been running in conventional form for decades. The underlying sterling fund launched in 2002 and is an Ireland-domiciled UCITS money market fund. It holds roughly £22bn and is Aviva Investors' largest fund. That figure covers the whole fund, not the tokenised share class.
Digital twin, not a migration
The tokenised class uses what the announcement calls a digital-twin structure. Holdings are represented on-chain, but the existing off-chain fund structure stays exactly where it is. Fund assets remain with custodian The Bank of New York Mellon. The launch release describes no migration of underlying debt instruments onto the ledger.
That matters for anyone expecting a pure on-chain fund. The tokens mirror a conventional share class. Investors in the tokenised version get the same investment objective, risk profile, liquidity characteristics and regulatory protections as conventional investors, according to the announcement. The fund itself sits within Aviva Investors Liquidity Funds plc, an open-ended Irish umbrella investment company with segregated liability between sub-funds, authorised by the Central Bank of Ireland.
Komainu, an institutional digital-asset custodian, and Licuido, which provides real-world asset tokenisation and trading infrastructure, supported the launch. The announcement doesn't spell out how responsibilities for wallet recovery, transfer approvals and reconciliation between the digital record and the off-chain fund structure are divided. Those operational details are left unspecified.
No open door for wallet holders
Aviva's liquidity product page doesn't offer an open subscription interface through which any wallet holder can invest. Prospective investors are directed to the distribution team, and eligibility rules apply. New clients go through know-your-customer and anti-money-laundering checks during onboarding. The launch release names eligible investors but doesn't state the sterling tokenised class's complete eligibility criteria.
The fund is a short-term, low-volatility net asset value money market fund benchmarked against SONIA, the Sterling Overnight Index Average. Its portfolio normally holds term deposits, reverse repo and cash-like instruments issued by governments, international bodies, banks and companies from markets around the world. Non-sterling investments are hedged against currency movements.
The rules inside the wrapper
The key information document for conventional share class 3 lays out the constraints. Weighted average maturity must stay at 60 days or less. Residual maturity to legal redemption can't exceed 397 days. The fund can put up to 10% of net asset value into other short-term money market funds. It targets a high Aaa rating from agencies such as Moody's.
There's no guarantee investors will recover their principal. The documentation warns that money market security values can change daily with interest rates, inflation and issuer creditworthiness. Custody risks are disclosed too: manager insolvency wouldn't affect fund assets held by the depositary, but depositary insolvency could cause financial loss.
For Aviva, the tokenised sterling class is the second step in a build-out that began with the dollar fund in July. The firm hasn't said whether more share classes or currencies will follow, or when the operational split between Komainu, Licuido and Aviva's own distribution team will be documented in detail. Until then, the product remains a conventional money market fund with a ledger-based record on top — and a distribution process that still runs through the firm's sales team rather than a wallet connection.
