EVP, Head of Digital Assets and Innovation
Franklin Templeton
Sandy Kaul is the Head of Digital Assets and Innovation at Franklin Templeton. Her team focuses on how disruptive technologies and innovation are reshaping the trajectory of asset and wealth management and how Franklin Templeton, our clients and our partners evolve their offerings to realize the benefits of new capabilities. Efforts span the enhancement of existing products and services, the creation of new offerings, and the deployment of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and digital assets.
Sandy and the team draw on a combination of proprietary industry surveys, a network of fintech investors and vendors, leading industry experts and regulators, and world-class technologists to create and deliver their industry views, advice and expertise. Her work covers the breadth of how investment portfolios, products, investment strategies, services, and customer engagement are evolving. Sandy is the co-chair of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission's Digital Asset Subcommittee and is on the World Economic Forum Digital Assets Advisory Board and the DTCC's Digital Asset Advisory Board. She is a frequent speaker at industry conferences, events, podcasts, and webinars and is a sought-after source of information and advice for senior industry leaders.
Prior to joining Franklin Templeton, Sandy had created and built out the Business Advisory Services team over a 12-year period with Citi Global Markets and within Citi Wealth Management. Earlier in her career, Sandy worked on the sell-side as a futures research analyst at Shearson Lehman Brothers, on the buy-side as a portfolio manager at Commodities Corporation/Goldman Sachs Asset Management and as a program manager at J.P. Morgan Private Bank. Sandy additionally has a background in consulting, leading the introduction of web-based capabilities into the institutional financial services space via her work with the innovative technology start-up firm Scient during the Dot.Com era and then with capital markets niche specialty consulting firm m.a.partners in the mid-2000s.
Sandy graduated with a major in History and a minor in Political Science from Colgate University. She actively supports the STEM-focused Young Women's Leadership School in the Bronx, NY that seeks to improve educational opportunities for women in underserved communities.
Banking is operating within a period of massive disruption. AI is shifting from a support function to a decisioning layer, real-time payments are resetting the definition of liquidity and speed, and tokenization is beginning to reshape how value is issued, moved, and held on balance sheets. Yet too many institutions continue to treat these forces as future-state initiatives rather than present-tense competitive realities.
This panel challenges leaders to confront a harder question: whether their operating models are structurally capable of keeping pace. As fintech platforms and Big Tech increasingly function as infrastructure layers rather than competitors, and as regulatory frameworks evolve into strategic variables, the traditional boundaries of banking advantage are eroding.
The discussion will focus on where disruption is already operational, where incumbents are most exposed, and why the greatest risk is internal execution lag—and what every leader needs to do about it.