- DBS and Citi completed what they called the first weekend cross-border US dollar payment between Singapore and the United States on Saturday, settling in minutes using tokenised deposits on Swift’s blockchain-based ledger.
- Tokenised deposits are claims on commercial-bank money that can move around the clock; the funds stayed inside regulated banking channels rather than circulating as a public stablecoin.
- The transfer ran on a Swift ledger pilot launched in July with 17 banks across six continents, including HSBC, Citi, DBS, Standard Chartered, UBS and BNP Paribas.
DBS and Citi settled a cross-border US dollar payment between Singapore and New York in minutes on Saturday, using tokenised deposits on Swift’s blockchain-based ledger to bypass the weekend closure of traditional payment systems.
The transaction ran through Citi’s New York office on September 5 and cleared in minutes, the banks said, against the up to two business days a conventional cross-border dollar transfer can take when weekends and time zones intervene.
DBS called it the first successful weekend dollar payment between the two markets. “Processing a live transaction over a weekend demonstrates that always-on cross-border payments are already a reality”, said Mridula Iyer, Citi’s head of services for Asia South.
The weekend transfer was the second live payment recorded on Swift’s ledger. HSBC and Standard Chartered completed the first in August, moving funds on the same infrastructure between their own books.
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Bank Money on a Shared Ledger
A tokenised deposit is a claim on money held at a commercial bank, recorded on a shared ledger so it can be transferred at any hour and redeemed through the issuing bank. The money stays inside the regulated banking system, unlike a stablecoin that circulates as a token on public networks.
Each bank issues the deposits on its own ledger, and the funds can move overnight and at weekends before final settlement clears through existing rails. Swift’s ledger sequences the transfers between participating banks, so the record of who owes whom updates in real time even when the underlying settlement systems are closed.
Swift said in July that its blockchain-based ledger was ready for initial use, opening a pilot with 17 banks across six continents to test around-the-clock tokenised payments. DBS is the only Asian-headquartered member of the 12-bank group designing the system.
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