The number of banks transacting on the Swift Ledger has accelerated to seven with the latest announcement by Singapore’s largest bank DBS that it conducted a weekend transaction with Citi in USD. The bank cited the speed benefit for corporate treasurers who can move tokenized deposits around the world 24/7 as well as for e-commerce and digital companies.
DBS Token Services, the bank’s tokenized deposit offering, has been live for almost two years. As with many solutions from large banks, it can only service clients of its own bank, although it is separately a founder of Partior for interbank payments. The Swift Ledger helps to orchestrate payments between different ledgers without directly processing them. Instead it helps to communicate instructions and commitments between the banks, netting obligations that can later be settled, for now in conventional ways. Swift is not only involved in payments, and the goals of the Ledger also include interoperability for securities.
Last week Citi announced its first Swift Ledger transactions with First Abu Dhabi Bank (FAB) and Oversea-Chinese Banking Corporation (OCBC). That follows previous transactions involving Standard Chartered and HSBC, and HSBC and UOB. What is notable is the speed with which the pilot banks have onboarded to the platform in the first two months post launch, reflecting the current momentum in tokenization. A total of 17 banks are expected to participate in this pilot period that runs until the end of the year.
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