I used to think the payments network Swift had an ironic name, because the reality of cross-border payments was that they were anything but swift. To be fair, the slowness actually comes from correspondent banks, whose internal payment systems and domestic networks may not work on weekends or bank holidays.

Swift doesn’t move money. Banks do.

That’s changing. Swift still doesn’t move money. But it’s getting a lot closer to it. On Saturday, September 5, DBS and Citi’s New York office completed a cross-border dollar payment using tokenized deposits and Swift new ledger. It took minutes.

Less than a year after Swift announced the ledger, banks are using it to move real value. These are pilots, but they’re happening more frequently with aims for production next year. A dollar payment arriving on a Saturday is something a Fortune 500 CFO will love.

Stablecoins give banks a good reason to get on with it. They have made moving dollars around the clock something customers can use without waiting for their bank to offer it. Internet native, VC-funded, and the perfect boogeyman.

Tokenized deposits give customers more useful bank balances, and banks a way to improve payments without replacing decades of infrastructure first.

I think dismissing tokenized deposits misses the point. The objections are reasonable. Why not upgrade the database? Why does the new service need a blockchain? And why wouldn’t the customer just use stablecoins?

Well, about that.

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A bank balance is very simply a record of what your bank owes you in a database. Moving money between banks means sending instructions and updating records at several institutions. Those database updates don’t happen at the same time.

In fact. They often happen during office hours, in different time zones, which means no weekends, and your 9 to 5 looks very different to Japan’s.

Think of it like sending emails. The emails move instantly, but people only read them when they’re awake. (In this metaphor, the bank's internal mainframe is the person reading the email).

If your bank doesn’t have a direct relationship with the recipient’s bank, it uses another bank that does. That’s correspondent banking: banks holding accounts with other banks so they can make payments for their customers. The larger banks also provide liquidity, currency conversion, and compliance checks along the way.

Here’s a simplified dollar payment where both banks use the same correspondent.

Every box has a cut-off time. Miss it by a minute, and the payment waits for the next batch. Miss it on a Friday and the payment waits for Monday. Every box is in a different time zone, so one bank’s 4 pm is another’s 4 am.

Now imagine instead of one correspondent there are several, depending on the currencies involved, or what local domestic payment systems allow. Now add that each bank has its own controls, processing windows, and liquidity requirements.

The Swift message can arrive instantly, but if the system that needs to act on it is closed, the payment waits. And one bank might have 10, 20 or 30 different core banking systems across its countries.

Any fix has to work around those systems. Nobody is going to make the mainframe in Jakarta read email on a Sunday. To which many a sensible person might say:

This is what many naively assume banks should do.

Chances are you’re looking at a bank that would very much like to.

If only it were that simple.

I remember speaking to a chief architect at one of the largest banks in the world. I’m paraphrasing, but the explanation was roughly this: we operate in more than 60 markets, and each country has its own mainframe instance. The people who wrote much of the code have long since retired. It has been adapted to local regulation over decades, with thousands of other systems connected to it. We don’t have a complete view of what depends on what.

I already understood how difficult replacing one core banking system could be (and if you’ve never lived through that, I ask you, dear reader, to Google some of the horror stories of banks who’ve tried and failed). That conversation gave me the scale of the difficulty.

Sixty-plus.

And you have to keep the bank running while you do it.

The architect wanted to reduce the bank’s dependence on those systems over time. Give them less to do. Make it possible to introduce something new without every change becoming a global core banking transformation.

A tokenized deposit is a bank deposit represented on a blockchain. It remains a claim on the bank. The service gives that deposit another way to move, with different operating hours and the ability to make payments programmable.

Instead of replacing the banking core, the new service sits alongside it (what some of you call a “side core”).

There are several designs, but imagine the bank sets aside a customer’s funds and creates a corresponding tokenized balance. The customer can move that balance through the new service. The bank keeps the records consistent and prevents the same money from being spent twice.

JPMorgan’s Kinexys, Citi Token Services and HSBC’s Tokenised Deposit Service offer versions of this. Corporate customers can move money around the clock within the markets and currencies each service supports.

Imagine a supplier won’t release your goods until it gets paid. If the payment can’t arrive over the weekend, you either pay early and tie up cash, borrow to cover the gap, or wait. The goods wait too. A treasury team has to plan around those cutoffs across currencies and countries.

The company that has done the most with this is Ant International (Alipay outside China) It plugged in its treasury platform, Whale, into tokenized deposit services at HSBC, Standard Chartered, DBS, JPMorgan, and at least five other banks. Ant can move USD, EUR, SGD, HKD and offshore renminbi between its own entities at those banks, any day, any hour.

That was nine banks and nine integrations. Ant has the engineers for that. Most treasuries don't.

And even Ant can only move money between Ant entities, one bank at a time. The moment Ant's HSBC entity wants to pay a supplier at DBS, on a Saturday, HSBC's side core has to talk to DBS's side core.

Whose database do they use?

One bank’s side core could run on Postgres. Tokenization doesn’t have a monopoly on weekend operations. A bank can build an additional payment service with a conventional database.

The harder question is how that service works with another bank’s.

Once Citi, HSBC, and DBS each have a service, their customers want to pay one another. The banks need to agree which payments are funded, which have completed, and what they owe each other.

If Citi hosts that record, HSBC is trusting Citi’s database admin. If Swift hosts it in a normal database, everyone is trusting Swift’s, and suddenly, Swift is a bank, and the most important bank in the world ever, by far.

The Swift ledger: banks need one record they all trust and ideally, none of them own.

That is the thing blockchains are good at. Not moving money. Keeping institutions that don’t fully trust each other, or, for commercial reasons, can’t centralize everything, in sync.

In fact, blockchains just happen to be really good at that, even if you do trust the central ledger:

Swift’s ledger gives them that shared record and the rules for moving through it.

This key signing + state machine + multiple actors who need to come to consensus is where blockchains shine.

You bank with Bank A. Your supplier banks with Bank B. It’s Saturday.

You instruct Bank A to pay $100. Bank A checks your balance and authorizes the payment. Then it signs a message to the ledger: Bank A owes Bank B $100, for this supplier. The ledger checks the conditions, records it, and Bank B sees it. Bank B credits your supplier.

The supplier now has $100 it can use. Minutes, not Monday.

Nothing traveled. No token left Bank A and turned into a Bank B token. Your deposit stayed on Bank A’s books. Your supplier’s new deposit is on Bank B’s. What moved on Saturday was a signed IOU between two banks, written on a ledger they both trust. (That is exactly how HSBC and Standard Chartered described the first live transaction: obligations recorded on each bank’s own system, Swift matching and netting them before settlement.)

Bank B paid your supplier before Bank A’s money arrived. Either Bank B prefunded that (cash parked, waiting for a Saturday that might not come) or it extended Bank A credit until Monday (risk).

(Helpfully, this is what banks do today in Swift; they just can’t record the movement of money for their mutual customers faster, even if they wanted to.)

Come Monday, the banks square up through the rails that already exist. If Bank A owes Bank B $100 and Bank B owes Bank A $80, they settle $20. That’s netting, which banks love, and is much more efficient than sending the gross value back and forth. (Read "Netting is all you need" for more.)

The ledger tracks the commitment and enforces the conditions. It doesn’t supply the money. Swift says banks retain responsibility for funding and settlement. So the risk didn’t vanish. It got written down, signed, and netted.

That is correspondent banking with better bookkeeping. I mean that as a compliment.

Swift isn’t the only one building something like this. The Clearing House, owned by JPMorgan, Bank of America, Citi, and Wells Fargo, is building a US tokenized deposit network for the first half of 2027. Some of the banks call it “the bridge.”

This is how your internal 24/7 payments service gets in sync with everyone else's, in a nice, tidy, programmable, end-to-end workflow.

And how you defend against stablecoins.

Large corporates quite like their banks. Not universally, not for innovation or fancy UIs, but for reliability and solving big problems.

Imagine you’re a multinational company. Your bank provides credit, manages your cash across countries, gives you FX pricing, and has people who can help when something goes wrong. You don’t necessarily want to replace that relationship. You want the bank to serve you better.

There is a lot of revenue attached to that relationship:

Fintech companies such as Airwallex and Nium, and global platforms such as Airbnb and Spotify, represent a valuable customer base that cares about innovation. They generate payment flows across markets and have opinions about APIs, pricing, and whether “come back on Monday” is an acceptable answer.

That creates room for companies like Augustus, which is building an always-on correspondent banking platform and expanding dollar and euro accounts into Latin America, Southeast Asia, and Africa.

Banks have a lot of revenue to defend. Augustus has a lot of margin to attack.

Stablecoin native core banking (which Augustus claims to have) is one way to do that.

I think better technology and better unit economics has a shot at winning some of those customers away to new transaction banks, or to Fintech companies like Airwallex.

The incumbents’ response is to make their existing accounts more useful while continuing to provide the lending, FX, and service their customers value. And the speed at which they’re moving shows you how much they care.

Of course the world is complex, and rarely binary.

I often say in finance everyone is your frenemy.

Stablecoins do something unique. They let you pay people and businesses outside your bank’s network, provided the recipient can accept and use the token. That is especially valuable where bank access is limited or expensive. But adopting a stablecoin doesn’t replace everything a corporate customer gets from its bank.

The difference starts with whose liability you hold:

A global platform will probably need a bit of both.

It might keep its operating money with a bank, borrow from that bank, and use stablecoins to pay suppliers elsewhere. The supplier may keep the stablecoins or convert them into a local bank balance.

Your bank money will work harder and 7 days a week. First inside one bank, then a group of connected banks. Your money will need to move between bank deposits and stablecoins, across institutions, currencies and networks.

Your money needs to move faster, cheaper, and to more places than it ever has before.

Tokens make money 24/7 and programmable.

Stablecoins make it open-loop.

Swift got swift.

And what’s left is the competition for your payments volume.

ST

* Different business groupings, both full-year figures. Shares and growth contributions are calculated from reported results; JPMorgan’s group comparison uses managed revenue. These figures show the scale of the franchises, not revenue attributable to tokenization.

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(1) All content and views expressed here are the authors' personal opinions and do not reflect the views of any of their employers or employees.

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(4) A team of researchers has not rigorously fact-checked this. Please don't take it as gospel.

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