Ripple has made strategic investments in UK fintech firms ZILO and Licuido, adding transfer-agency, token-issuance and collateral-market capabilities to its institutional infrastructure on the XRP Ledger. The deals are intended to connect tokenized fund ownership records with issuance, trading and collateral workflows, building on technical relationships that were already supporting Ripple’s capital-markets strategy.
The investments were announced on August 3, but Ripple did not disclose the amounts committed or the ownership stakes acquired. The announcement expands Ripple’s available infrastructure without confirming that the combined platform is already operating at scale, and the companies did not provide deployment dates, transaction targets or newly signed institutional clients.
ZILO Unifies Traditional and Tokenized Fund Administration
ZILO launched an integrated Digital Transfer Agency platform alongside the Ripple investment. The system is designed to manage conventional fund units and digitally native share classes through one operating layer, covering issuance, settlement, reconciliation, payments, corporate actions and regulatory reporting. ZILO’s role is to preserve an authoritative ownership record as fund interests move onchain, reducing the need for separate systems for legacy and tokenized assets.
The company says fund structures, share-class rules and jurisdictional requirements can be configured through its interface and translated into logic for blockchain deployment. That configuration model could reduce operational complexity for asset managers, but its effectiveness will depend on each fund’s legal documents, regulatory treatment and production implementation.
Licuido addresses the issuance and secondary-market side of the structure. Its platform is designed to tokenize eligible assets and let institutions use fund shares as collateral rather than liquidating them to raise cash. Ripple’s backing is intended to scale Licuido’s collateral marketplace on XRPL, where asset transfers and payment could settle atomically.
Licuido’s regulatory position requires precise wording. Licuido Markets Limited is an appointed representative of Sapeno Partners LLP, which is authorized and regulated by the UK Financial Conduct Authority. Licuido is therefore not directly FCA-authorized in its own right, and its permitted regulated activities operate under the responsibility of its principal firm.
RLUSD Would Provide the Settlement Cash Leg
Ripple plans to use RLUSD as the cash side of delivery-versus-payment transactions involving tokenized funds. Under that model, the fund token and payment would settle together rather than through separate processes. RLUSD’s proposed role is settlement currency, while ZILO and Licuido provide the ownership, issuance and collateral infrastructure required around the asset.
Ripple Mint is a related but separate service. Launched in July, it gives eligible institutions interfaces and APIs to mint, redeem, bridge and manage RLUSD. Ripple Mint does not replace the transfer-agent or collateral-market functions supplied by ZILO and Licuido, although it could support the stablecoin operations used in those workflows.
The investments follow Aviva Investors’ launch of a tokenized share class of its US Dollar Liquidity Fund on XRPL, which involved Ripple, ZILO and Licuido. Ripple also cited work with Franklin Templeton and DBS as evidence of institutional interest, but the new investments do not establish how widely the combined infrastructure will be adopted.
ZILO previously disclosed a £25 million Series A and a $27 million Series A2 round. Ripple’s latest contribution remains unquantified, making a precise cumulative funding total difficult to establish from company disclosures alone. The next meaningful evidence will be live fund deployments, collateral usage and RLUSD settlement volume, rather than the investment announcements themselves.
