Cité Gestion SA, a Swiss bank and wealth manager, has issued its shares in the form of ledger-based securities and obtained the CMTA.Tokenized Shares certification, becoming the first bank to secure the certification.

"At Cité Gestion, our vision is to make it possible for our clients to take full advantage of technological progress in the capital markets, and in particular of the huge potential of rationalization and efficiency gains that the distributed ledger technology offers in this field," explains Christophe Utelli, Deputy CEO of Cité Gestion. "It was important for our bank to be among the first to take advantage of the new possibilities offered by Swiss law for the digitalization of securities by tokenizing our own shares. As a robust, open-source and industry-supported framework, the CMTA standard was a natural choice for the tokenization."

CMTA's label provides assurance that shares have been tokenized in compliance with Swiss law and CMTA’s recommendations. The tokenization process was carried out using Taurus’ tokenization platform Taurus-CAPITAL. The tokens were created using the CMTAT, an open-source smart contract published by the CMTA and specifically dedicated to the tokenization of securities, and recorded on Ethereum.

The potential for tokenized shares to improve access to financing through regulated trading platforms is widely known, however as a private bank, Cité Gestion's shares will not be offered to the public. Making the move to digital shares offers nonetheless a number of other advantages; companies have a real-time and accurate view of their shareholder base online, whilst their shareholders benefit from legal certainty for share transfers, thanks to the evidence of ownership provided by the digital ledger.