BMO, CIBC, National Bank of Canada, RBC, Scotiabank and TD Join Tokenized Deposit Race
Canada's BIG SIX banks, BMO, CIBC, National Bank of Canada, RBC, Scotiabank and TD, join tokenized deposit race.
The six banks are jointly exploring Canadian dollar-based digital money solutions, beginning with an initiative designed to enable tokenized deposits to move efficiently between Canadian financial institutions.
The ambition is to deliver faster, more efficient and programmable payments while preserving the safety, stability and regulatory oversight of commercial bank money.
And the longer-term objective goes beyond payments between banks: connecting this infrastructure with other emerging digital-asset initiatives.
➡️ Why this matters
It is no secret tokenized deposit is moving towards meangingful transaction volumes.
JPMorgan and Citi are among the volume leaders, with their respective tokenized-money infrastructures processing close to $10B a day on their own networks alone.
The next unlock is interbank interoperability: moving tokenized commercial bank money seamlessly between institutions.
Swift’s latest work is accelerating this through a “hub-of-hubs” model connecting banks and their emerging digital-money infrastructure. Recent transactions already have involved multiple banks:
The Canadian initiative tackles the same fundamental problem from another direction: building domestic infrastructure for tokenized deposits to move between banks.
Swift is well positioned to provide the orchestration and interoperability layer connecting different bank networks, technologies and jurisdictions.
But within individual markets, I expect major banks to increasingly explore shared domestic rails capable of more direct — and potentially atomic — settlement of tokenized commercial bank money.
Even though the option of utilising Swift's blockchain solution for connecting seperate individual tokenized infrastructure is already in place.
It is an early indication of what the institutional digital-money stack could ultimately look like:
Bank-issued tokenized deposits → shared domestic settlement infrastructure → interoperability across borders and networks.
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