Centrifuge integrates onchain reserve management for loyalty programs with Janus Henderson and SMT

Loyalty programs issue more than $300 billion in value every year. The infrastructure managing the money behind those points and rewards? Still running like it’s 2005.

Centrifuge, Janus Henderson, and SmartMedia Technologies (SMT) announced a partnership to bring onchain reserve management to the loyalty industry through institutional tokenized vaults. The initiative connects Janus Henderson’s asset management muscle with SMT’s loyalty infrastructure and Centrifuge’s tokenization platform, targeting the long-standing disconnect between how loyalty reserves are held and how points are actually issued and redeemed.

What the partnership actually does

The new system routes reserve assets into Janus Henderson’s tokenized strategies, specifically its JTRSY and JAAA products, which together manage $1.5 billion in assets under management as of August 2026. By tokenizing these reserves on Centrifuge’s infrastructure, the loyalty program operator gets real-time visibility into reserve balances, automated compliance, and the ability to programmatically link reserve movements to point issuance and redemption.

SMT brings the distribution side. The company’s SmartPoints protocol enables programmable loyalty rewards that work across different ecosystems, and its client roster includes names like Visa, FIFA, and Samsung.

Why loyalty reserves are ripe for tokenization

The $300 billion figure for annual loyalty value issuance sounds massive, and it is. But the reserve management practices behind that number have barely evolved in decades. Most loyalty programs treat their financial reserves as a treasury function completely separate from their technology stack. The result is delayed settlement, opaque reporting, and a persistent gap between what a program promises its members and what’s actually sitting in the reserve account at any given moment.

Tokenization collapses that gap. When reserves exist as onchain assets, every movement is auditable in real time. The loyalty platform can verify that sufficient reserves exist before issuing new points, rather than discovering shortfalls after the fact.

The institutional tokenization trend keeps accelerating

Centrifuge specializes in connecting real-world assets to decentralized finance infrastructure, and its institutional vault architecture is designed specifically for regulated entities that need compliance guardrails alongside onchain efficiency. The protocol’s offerings include ERC-7540 vaults tailored for institutional fund management.

For brands operating loyalty programs, the practical appeal comes down to three things: lower operational costs from automated reconciliation, better capital efficiency from real-time reserve visibility, and reduced counterparty risk from transparent onchain accounting.

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