The Most Powerful Women in Finance, #3, Jenny Johnson, Franklin Templeton

This summer, asset manager Franklin Templeton bought a crypto investment team and said it would make part of the purchase with digital tokens the firm mints itself.

The purchase puts Franklin Templeton "among a small group of global asset managers with a dedicated, institutional-grade crypto investment management team," Jenny Johnson, the firm's CEO, said in an April 1 press release announcing the agreement.

Johnson joined the firm in 1988, more than three decades before she became chief executive of a company her grandfather founded. It managed $1.79 trillion at the end of June.

The tokens Franklin Templeton is using to pay for the crypto investment team are called BENJI; each one is a $1-pegged share in a Franklin Templeton money market fund. The company that maintains the fund's official ownership records keeps them on a blockchain rather than in its own books.

Paying with the tokens is a step toward running mergers and acquisitions on a blockchain, the release said. The firm did not say what it paid, or how much of the price the tokens covered.

The team Franklin Templeton bought, 250 Digital, actively manages crypto investments and was spun out of the venture firm CoinFund. The purchase created Franklin Crypto, a new division of the asset management firm.

The acquisition extends a bet on blockchain that Johnson credits to the years she spent running the firm's back office. She was Franklin Templeton's chief information officer starting in 2003 and ran operations and technology from 2005 to 2010 before becoming chief operating officer.

"I ran our operations and technology businesses, so I knew how much time and money the industry spends reconciling data between systems and with counterparties," Johnson told American Banker.

"Blockchain creates a single source of truth, allows smart contracts to execute automatically and enables transactions to settle immediately," she said. Smart contracts refer to code that moves money on its own once set conditions are met.

Not everyone at the firm agreed at the time, she said.

"There were plenty of people who questioned why we were investing in digital assets so early, especially after periods of volatility in crypto," Johnson said. "But I believed we had to support the team that was thinking about the future."

The firm launched the Franklin OnChain U.S. Government Money Fund in April 2021. It was the first U.S.-registered mutual fund to use a public blockchain to process transactions and record who owns its shares, according to Franklin Templeton.

The platform behind the fund now runs on nine blockchains, though only one of the nine is open to retail investors. The rest serve institutions.

The firm went on to open the first retail tokenized fund in Singapore in 2025, according to a June 2 press release.

It also launched three exchange-traded funds that hold cryptocurrency directly, between January 2024 and February 2025.

Much of the rest of finance has since caught up. JPMorgan Chase, BlackRock and Goldman Sachs have all launched or piloted tokenized funds.

The market for tokenized money market funds passed $7 billion in February, after growing more than 160% in a year, according to an American Banker analysis.

Franklin Templeton's four tokenized money funds held $2.5 billion between them on Sept. 11, according to rwa.xyz, which tracks the markets for a range of tokenized asset classes.

Only three other firms, including BlackRock, had more total value in tokenized Treasury funds than Franklin Templeton, which ranked above JPMorgan Chase, Invesco and BNY.

The shift to blockchain-based financial infrastructure will arrive faster than most expect, Johnson said, and her industry "will evolve more over the next five years than it has over the last fifty years."

For women entering an area of finance that is still largely composed of men, Johnson encouraged them to not wait until they were fully informed to raise their hands.

"Don't let a lack of confidence be the reason you pass on the next role," she said. "You may not feel 100% ready or have 100% of the information. You have to be willing to step in, make the best decision you can, and learn as you go."