When Luxembourg’s financial watchdog granted Investre the country’s first control agent licence this summer, it marked a quiet milestone in Europe’s race to digitise finance. For Georges Bock, Investre’s founder and former KPMG partner turned blockchain evangelist, the message is less about triumph than urgency.
“The technology is evolving too fast for complacency,” he told Investment Officer. “If we’re smart about it and give the market what’s needed, we can further build our position. If we’re complacent or lazy, there might be big damage to this existing fund industry.”
The CSSF granted Investre the first licence for a control agent, a new role created to ensure that the use of distributed ledger technology (DLT) in managing securities remains secure, transparent and legally compliant. Bock said the approval “unlocks the full potential of fund tokenization, not as a buzzword, but as the backbone of a more efficient, transparent and investor-friendly financial system.”
The approval follows the enactment of Luxembourg’s Blockchain Bill IV in January 2025, a landmark reform that embeds DLT into the country’s financial framework. The law allows investment funds to issue and manage units directly on blockchain networks and introduces the agent of control, a role Investre is now pioneering, to ensure tokenized securities are accurately recorded, reconciled and compliant with legal standards.
Continuous reconciliation
As Bock explained, the control agent registers new fund shares on the blockchain and ensures that what the fund issues matches what is circulating in the market, maintaining continuous reconciliation and oversight of the chain of ownership.
“There aren’t other players in this space right now,” he said, noting that while some transfer agents are tokenising funds, they still rely on nominative records. “Investre’s concept is more powerful, not just in how it uses blockchain, but in how the legal setup allows units to float on the market.”
Though Investre currently has no direct competitors, Bock expects that to change. “We’ve had the lucky chance of already operating tokens, so we could quickly convince the CSSF that we can do it because we’ve done it already.”
Regulatory edge
After leaving KPMG Luxembourg following 18 years of service, Bock attended the MIT Sloan School of Management to deepen his expertise in blockchain and digital economies. He views the United States and the European Union as roughly equivalent in tokenizing securities, although Europe may still have a small regulatory edge, one he doubts will last.
The United States, he said, has focused on digital money but lagged behind Europe on financial securities regulation. That could change following the Genius Act, signed by President Donald Trump in July 2025, which aims to strengthen U.S. leadership in digital money and enable the issuance of U.S. dollar stablecoins. “That’s something we also look for in Europe,” Bock said. “The large use of stablecoins allows me to have the full force of the securities token.”
Europe, by contrast, lags in launching the digital euro and lacks large-scale legislation for stablecoins. “The U.S. dollar takes supremacy on the digital currency side,” Bock warned, “but hopefully Europe will follow soon.”
Bock has called Luxembourg’s Blockchain Bill IV a “major push” for future capital market infrastructure, easing the issuance of securities and reinforcing the country’s strength in legal innovation. Still, he is watching developments elsewhere, including France, Germany with its tokenized bonds, Ireland and the Baltic states, all of which he sees as “pretty powerful” in blockchain adoption.
Private banking
Bock also serves on several boards, including the supervisory board of Bank Julius Baer Europe S.A. since January 2022. Though a strong advocate for digitalisation, he believes traditional private banking will endure.
“Non-private or fake private banks are going to go away,” he said. “They price their services as private banking but don’t deliver them, and that’s where clients may move to digital platforms instead.” Smart private banks, he added, must at least digitise their communication channels.
A long-time proponent of financial literacy, Bock argued that Europe lags behind the United States, where exposure to markets is often taught at home. “In the U.S., parents are exposed to stocks, so kids naturally learn from them,” he said. “In Luxembourg and Europe, there’s no such culture.”
Embedding financial literacy more deeply in the education system, he believes, would provide a foundation for young people to build on. To that end, Bock launched the Moniflo Investment School, linked to Investre’s Moniflo platform, to help people at all levels learn the basics of investing.