Pendle Blog

Pendle RWA Insights — New York Life Investment Management

New York Life Investment Management on building its first tokenized fund with two people and no committee, and why regulation still holds insurers back

By Pendle Team · 12 Nov 2026

In this episode of RWA Insights, Jake and TN from Pendle speak with Elizabeth Yenko, Head of Digital Asset Strategy, and Thomas Sy, Managing Director and Head of Multi-Asset Solutions at New York Life Investment Management.

In this interview, they discuss how a 2-person working group led to the firm's first tokenized fund with Centrifuge, why insurers and other large institutions are still slow to put capital onchain in volume and more.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbRfClkURLs

About New York Life Investment Management

New York Life Investment Management is the global asset management business of New York Life, the mutual life insurer founded in 1845. It managed $838 billion as of 30 June 2026 through affiliated boutiques including MacKay Shields, Candriam and Apogem Capital, and ranked 28th on Pensions & Investments' 2025 list of the largest institutional managers.

In June 2026 it launched its first tokenized fund with Centrifuge, the NYLIM Anemoy U.S. High Yield Corporate Bond Segregated Portfolio. Subscriptions and redemptions settle in USDC, and the fund is open to eligible investors outside the United States.

About Elizabeth Yenko

Elizabeth Yenko is Head of Digital Asset Strategy at New York Life Investment Management. She joined New York Life Ventures, the insurer's venture arm, in 2017 and went on to lead its Innovation Services team. Before New York Life she spent more than 15 years in finance and leadership roles at startups including Clear and SpeechCycle.

About Thomas Sy

Thomas Sy is Managing Director and Head of Multi-Asset Solutions at New York Life Investment Management, the team that has run the firm's multi-asset strategies since 2006. He joined in 2011 to lead alternatives product development, after earlier roles at BlackRock, Van Kampen, Morgan Stanley and Bridgewater Associates. He and Elizabeth set up the firm's digital asset working group together.

What convinced New York Life that now was the time to move into tokenization?

• Elizabeth puts it down to an internal push and market developments more than client demand.
• As head of innovation on the New York Life Ventures team, she kept seeing real-world assets come up in her research, and saw peer financial institutions start to experiment.
• She began asking around the organization whether anyone else was looking at it, and found Thomas had been doing the same research on his own.
• The two formed a working group within NYLIM. Within six to nine months they had done the research, spoken to onchain participants, designed a product and partnered with Centrifuge to launch it.

Stripping away the buzzwords, what does tokenization improve for an institution and for the end investor?

• Elizabeth's short answer is better, faster and cheaper, both for investors and for how NYLIM runs its own products, with a better client experience as the end result.
• Thomas says the firm's North Star is better investment outcomes. Tokenization helps by making customized portfolios possible for individual investors and at scale for institutions, across all asset classes.
• His example is inflation. TIPS are still the main inflation hedge asset managers offer, and he expects tokenization to let managers wrap strategies that could never be packaged before, including new ways to protect against inflation.
• Distribution and operational savings are real, in his view, but secondary. They were not why NYLIM entered the space.

When NYLIM evaluated tokenization, who was in the room and what were they asking?

• All of the asset manager's senior leaders were involved. Elizabeth says the first questions are always how it benefits clients and how to protect them from undue risk.
• Thomas says the due diligence framework didn't change. NYLIM applied the same principles New York Life has used for more than 180 years, and the missing piece was technical knowledge, which he and Elizabeth built by meeting people across the industry.
• He applies a one-way door test. NYLIM avoids steps it couldn't walk back, and will consider ones it can reverse.
• Regulation mattered most. He can model investment risk but not regulatory risk, so each piece of clarity from the GENIUS Act, the SEC and the CFTC changed the calculation. NYLIM didn't need full clarity, only enough on the plus side to get comfortable.

What has surprised you most about how the tokenization market has developed?

• Elizabeth expected NYLIM to do all of the learning. The education has turned out to go both ways.
• Thomas describes a shift away from both sides assuming they were right and talking past each other. Crypto has produced creative ideas TradFi needs to adopt, and TradFi frameworks were built over generations and many market cycles.
• He has learned that onchain investors weight headline yield heavily and work to different risk and reward frameworks. Managing money for large institutions and individuals, NYLIM knows every extra point of yield means taking on more risk, and investors need to be shown what that risk is.
• TN agreed, pointing to the exploits in the first half of this year. An extra 2% to 3% over offchain products can come with the risk of losing the entire principal if the underlying protocol is exploited.
• Thomas's rule for fixed income is that the upside is clipping coupons and the downside is losing principal, so the long-term winner protects the downside rather than optimizing for yield. He also wants onchain markets to offer more than yield products, from private assets to equity, and expects demand for that range to follow.

What is stopping traditional institutions from coming onchain in volume?

• Education comes first for Elizabeth. Many institutions still conflate tokenization with crypto and assume it means buying Bitcoin, though less so than a year ago.
• Regulation is the other gap. As an insurer, New York Life also answers to insurance regulators, whose rules on holding anything they define as a digital asset still lack clarity.
• Until that changes, she doesn't expect insurers to put capital onchain, and expects other large, conservative institutions to be in a similar position.
• Thomas adds that the market needs more liquidity, and that much of the plumbing behind offchain markets, clearing included, still has to be rebuilt onchain before this works at scale.

Where is the real demand today, as opposed to narrative?

• Thomas respects asset managers who test products incrementally, even when the result falls short of the ideal of natively issued assets with onchain liquidity. A firm has to bring the whole institution along, and testing is the only way to get there.
• On demand, he sees no reason today for a US investor to buy a US stock onchain. A brokerage account is more efficient and keeps everything in one place.
• More investors and more products have to arrive together. He calls it a chicken and egg problem and expects it to resolve over time.

What is the hardest part of building a digital asset capability inside a large, established institution?

• Elizabeth's answer is education. Much of the gap is vocabulary, with both sides using different words for the same ideas, and the aim is for staff to be as comfortable with onchain terms as they are with TradFi ones.
• Thomas sees tokenization reaching infrastructure and operations as well as product. Legal, compliance, risk, operations, management and the front, middle and back office all have to come along, and the material has to be tailored to each group and use case.
• TN said education is a big part of Pendle's go-to-market as well. Most Pendle users are crypto natives who know ETH, BTC and memecoins, and explaining who the RWA issuers are and where the yield comes from takes real effort.

How should onchain markets like Pendle be explained to institutions?

• Asked what composable onchain markets offer that traditional rails don't, Thomas went back to Pendle first. He rates the technology highly, but PT and YT aren't the terms he uses with colleagues.
• He describes YT as similar to an interest-only strip, and PT as a zero coupon bond or Treasury strip, structures traditional finance has traded for decades.
• Making that translation was when Pendle clicked for him, and he sees people in his position acting as translators between the two worlds for now.
• TN said he'd take this back to Pendle's content team so material aimed at issuers carries clearer TradFi analogies.
• The pitch also has to fit the use case. A life insurer buys a bond to hold for 30 years, so instant settlement means little, and accuracy and lower transaction costs are what would move that trade onchain.

Will TradFi and DeFi infrastructure converge, run in parallel, or will one absorb the other?

• Elizabeth already sees some overlap, and expects institutions to keep two sets of records in two places for a while.
• Over time she expects convergence, with TradFi institutions taking on the best parts of onchain markets once their own systems are modernized.
• She doesn't see it as a wholesale merger, more a combination of the two over the long term.

What would you tell a peer at another institution who is still on the fence about digital assets?

• Thomas sees two reasonable choices, innovate or protect your moat and build a stronger castle. Sitting in the middle and doing nothing is the worst option, and firms that don't test risk being left behind.
• His own advice is to innovate. Once it is translated into day-to-day terms the technology is plumbing, and he admits it took him months to understand looping and staking, or even to define DeFi.
• At New York Life it took two people willing to make a bet, with no committee. NYLIM didn't start with a five-product plan and now has a pipeline of projects to execute.
• Elizabeth's advice is to start somewhere and take incremental steps, which is still how NYLIM works, building on each step with no fixed five-year plan.