Swift Launches Blockchain Ledger as 17 Banks Prepare to Pilot Tokenized Deposit Payments

Swift, the cooperative that underpins most of the world’s cross-border bank messaging, announced Wednesday that its blockchain-based ledger is ready for initial use. Seventeen banks from six continents are lining up to pilot live transactions on it using tokenized deposits, aiming for round-the-clock payment availability.

The participating banks include ANZ, BNP Paribas, BNY, Citi, DBS, First Abu Dhabi Bank, FirstRand, HSBC, Itaú Unibanco, Lloyds, Mashreq, MUFG, OCBC, Standard Chartered, UBS, UOB, and Wells Fargo. The shared ledger acts as an orchestration layer for bank-issued tokenized deposits, letting institutions move customer funds, including overnight and on weekends, before completing final settlement through existing rails. Swift said it designed and built the system in about nine months.

The move offers a real-world test of tokenized deposits, the bank-issued answer to stablecoins that keeps customer money inside the regulated banking perimeter. Rather than cede 24/7 digital payments to crypto-native issuers, the world’s largest banks are building their own on-chain plumbing.

Swift positioned the ledger as a foundation for future features like programmable money and what it called agentic commerce, with functionality expanding after an initial controlled go-live. Chief Business Officer Thierry Chilosi said the goal is to let tokenized value move across borders with the speed “modern commerce expects” while keeping the compliance and resilience of established finance. The effort runs alongside Swift’s broader push to speed up conventional payments, 75% of which it says now reach the recipient bank within 10 minutes.

The launch lands amid a wave of bank tokenization. A group of the largest US banks is planning its own tokenized deposit network through The Clearing House by 2027, and lenders from JPMorgan to Citi have rolled out individual deposit-token and tokenization products over the past year. Swift’s advantage is reach: it already sits between virtually every bank on earth.

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