What it means for institutions and corporates

Technology and how it moves money is cyclical. Innovation disrupts, industry adapts, and some of what was once cutting-edge becomes mainstream.

From a corporate banking perspective, we are now part of a financial system that continues its journey towards an “always on” 24/7 market infrastructure.

This is where legacy systems comprising batch processing and cut-off times are navigated alongside the agility and reach of digital money solutions.

As technologies have fast-forwarded the development of digital payment and asset management products and services, it is our duty as a globally systemic bank to be ready for what clients will ask us in a digital money, digital wallet-structured landscape.

This paper provides an essential briefing on the three main types of digital money that are already seeing real-world use cases.

Stablecoins are developing as a bridge between blockchain-based ecosystems and traditional finance, while tokenised deposits are extending the existing banking model into programmable environments, preserving the role of commercial bank money while enabling new functionality.

In parallel, central banks are exploring retail and wholesale central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), with a growing focus on their role in supporting tokenised markets and improving cross-border settlement.

Supportive regulatory frameworks are taking shape across major jurisdictions, and financial institutions and corporates are working together with regulators and market infrastructure providers to build the foundations for more continuous, data-rich and interoperable systems. For example, we are contributing to this through initiatives such as Project Agorá, as well as through our partnership with Partior, helping to drive next-generation settlement models and cross-border infrastructure.

Alongside our active involvement, we believe banks will ultimately play an important role in abstracting complexity from clients – ensuring that, depending on the nature of each transaction, the most appropriate form of digital money is used, whether a stablecoin, a tokenised deposit or a CBDC.

With all of this in mind, I am pleased to introduce this white paper, Digital Money – a perspective on stablecoins, tokenised deposits, and CBDCs, which explains the structure of each type, sets out where momentum is building, and concludes with what these changes mean in practice for corporates, financial institutions and asset custodians.