mBridge Drives Standard Chartered’s $11B Payment Run Rate
- Tokenization Insight
- 9 hours ago
- 2 min read
Standard Chartered has disclosed that its tokenised-money activity reached an approximately $11 billion monthly run rate
In the bank’s Q2 2026 results presentation, CEO Bill Winters said:
“We’ve also seen material tokenised deposit growth in 2026, with around $11 billion monthly run rate, primarily from the e-CNY cross-border settlements on mBridge and our multicurrency work with various clients.”
➡️ Signal behind the story
One longstanding criticism of institutional digital payments is that they work well inside a single bank’s network but become considerably harder when multiple banks, currencies and jurisdictions must participate.
mBridge was designed to address that challenge.
The platform provides a common DLT-based infrastructure on which participating central and commercial banks can settle cross-border payments and FX transactions using wholesale central bank digital currencies.
Standard Chartered is not the issuer or operator of mBridge. It participates at the commercial-bank layer, connecting its corporate clients and transaction-banking infrastructure to the new settlement rail.
The bank participated in the original real-value pilot through both its Hong Kong and UAE entities. Standard Chartered Hong Kong now provides year-round, instant settlement with participating banks in mainland China, with transaction volumes reportedly growing rapidly.
A transaction can therefore move from:
1️⃣ A corporate client’s conventional bank deposit
2️⃣ Through Standard Chartered’s payment, compliance and FX infrastructure
3️⃣ Into wholesale e-CNY on mBridge
4️⃣ To another participating bank with final settlement directly on the shared ledger
mBridge covers China, Hong Kong, UAE, Thailand, Saudi Arabia and Macau.
And it is not the only model developing.
- Project Agorá is exploring a shared platform combining tokenised central-bank reserves and commercial-bank deposits.
- Project Dunbar demonstrated the viability of a common multi-CBDC platform.
- Partior is already processing live multicurrency flows using tokenised commercial-bank money.
- Swift has now begun enabling interoperability between banks’ separate tokenised-deposit systems.
Cross-border wholesale digital payments are not waiting for one universal network to emerge. They are already scaling corridor by corridor - largely outside public view.
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