A joint report from the Association for Financial Markets in Europe (AFME) and the European Association of Corporate Treasurers (EACT) argues that distributed ledger technology has crossed the threshold from capital markets experimentation into practical tooling for corporate treasury teams. The paper maps DLT applications across ten areas of corporate finance, from cross border payments and collateral management through to bond issuance, trade finance and private credit. Its central message is that treasurers should treat DLT and tokenization as a near term operational capability, with the clearest payoffs today in cross border payments, collateral mobility, intraday liquidity and tokenized fixed income.
The largest banks have all launched tokenized deposit solutions which enable corporates to position money where they need it 24/7, but also to pool liquidity. Those pools can then be moved into tokenized money market funds to earn yield. The report talks about a wave of tokenized money market funds from the likes of BlackRock, JP Morgan, State Street and BNP Paribas that now allows corporates to invest surplus cash on an intraday and programmable basis rather than locking it up overnight. It doesn’t mention one of the most public examples of corporate treasury adoption, in which Amundi created a tokenized fund and Ant International invested its pooled liquidity into it.
Turning to fixed income, global issuance of DLT based instruments reached EUR 1.69 billion by the end of 2025, a 629% increase on 2021 levels, with Siemens as the most visible corporate issuer after placing both digital bonds and commercial paper on chain.
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