New York Life Investment Management is quietly rewiring how $800B in assets moves

New York Life Investment Management doesn’t exactly scream “crypto native.” The firm traces its roots back to 1845 and oversees somewhere north of $800 billion in assets. And yet, at the RWA Summit in Brooklyn on September 1-2, 2026, two of its senior executives will take the stage to explain how they’re rebuilding the plumbing of traditional asset management on blockchain rails.

The talk is titled “How a legacy asset manager is building for an onchain future.”

The tokenized fund that started it all

NYLIM launched its first tokenized product back in June 2026. The NYLIM Anemoy U.S. High Yield Corporate Bond Segregated Portfolio, mercifully shortened to HYB, was built in partnership with Centrifuge, one of the more established names in real-world asset tokenization.

The fund allows investors to subscribe and redeem using USDC, the Circle-issued stablecoin. That alone is a meaningful departure from the traditional process, which typically involves wire transfers, T+1 or T+2 settlement windows, and the kind of back-office reconciliation that makes accountants age prematurely.

But the bigger upgrade arrives on September 1, 2026, when NYLIM integrates RedStone’s Settle service into the fund. That integration is designed to enable onchain exits in roughly 300 milliseconds. To put that in perspective, a traditional mutual fund redemption can take days.

Elizabeth Yenko, NYLIM’s Head of Digital Assets Strategy, and Thomas Sy, Head of Multi-Asset Solutions, are the two executives presenting at the summit. The firm has been designated an Innovator Partner for the 2026 RWA Summit.

Why a firm managing $800B+ cares about tokenization

NYLIM manages between $807 billion and $838 billion as of January 1, 2026, depending on the reporting source. At that scale, even marginal improvements in settlement speed and operational overhead translate to real money.

Tokenized real-world assets, excluding stablecoins, surpassed $38 billion in August 2026 according to data from RWA.xyz.

The broader institutional migration

The choice of Centrifuge as a partner is notable. The protocol has carved out a niche as a bridge between traditional finance and decentralized infrastructure, focusing specifically on structured credit and real-world asset pools.

RedStone’s Settle integration adds another layer. The 300-millisecond exit capability addresses one of the persistent objections institutional investors raise about tokenized funds, which is liquidity risk. If you can exit a position in the same block you request redemption, the liquidity profile of the product starts to resemble something closer to an exchange-traded instrument than a traditional fund.

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