ANZ was named as one of 17 participating banks when Swift formally announced the shared blockchain ledger consortium on July 9, 2026. The ledger is designed to let large companies move money across borders at any hour, including nights, weekends, and public holidays, when conventional correspondent banking networks are effectively frozen.

What a tokenised deposit actually is

A tokenised deposit is not a stablecoin, and the distinction matters. Stablecoins are instruments issued against a pool of reserve assets and sit outside traditional banking balance sheets. A tokenised deposit, by contrast, remains on the issuing bank's books, earns interest, and falls under deposit insurance schemes such as Australia's Financial Claims Scheme, which is administered by APRA. The token is essentially a digital representation of a conventional bank deposit, governed by existing banking regulation rather than crypto-asset frameworks. This structure is what makes it attractive to corporate treasurers who need settlement speed without taking on new regulatory or counterparty risk.

The timing of the initiative is not coincidental. Swift's Chief Business Officer has framed the project explicitly as a response to the growing institutional threat from stablecoins, particularly Circle's USDC and the wave of payment stablecoins expected to emerge in the United States following the passage of the GENIUS Act. By building a bank-native alternative that sits inside existing regulatory perimeters, the 17-bank consortium aims to counter stablecoin networks at the institutional layer before they gain further ground in corporate treasury.

How the Swift ledger works

Swift built the shared ledger on Hyperledger Besu, a permissioned blockchain compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), the programming environment that underpins most of the Ethereum ecosystem. The build took roughly nine months. When a participating bank executes a cross-border payment, tokenised deposits move instantly on the shared chain. Final settlement is then routed back through existing correspondent banking infrastructure, so the ledger functions as an orchestration layer on top of current rails rather than a replacement for them. Swift reports that 75 percent of its payments already reach recipient banks within 10 minutes. The blockchain layer is intended to address the remaining 25 percent that get held up by time-zone gaps and calendar constraints.

Lisa Vasic, ANZ's Managing Director for Transaction Banking, framed the bank's position plainly: "Swift's digital ledger initiative is an important step in advancing real-time, always-on cross-border payment capabilities. By combining Swift's trusted network with this new infrastructure, we see strong potential to help customers move funds in real-time and manage liquidity more flexibly."

Swift's Chief Business Officer, Thierry Chilosi, described the goal as enabling tokenised value to move across borders at the speed "modern commerce expects," while maintaining the compliance and resilience standards of established finance.

ANZ's track record on tokenisation

ANZ has the most extensive public history of any Australian bank in bank-issued digital money. In March 2022 it minted A$30 million worth of A$DC, a stablecoin on a public EVM-compatible chain, for client Victor Smorgon Group, with Fireblocks and Zerocap acting as intermediaries, making ANZ the first commercial bank globally to issue a stablecoin on a permissionless public blockchain. It subsequently used A$DC to purchase tokenised carbon credits from Grollo Carbon Ventures in 2023, and in 2024 participated in the Hong Kong Monetary Authority's e-HKD+ pilot alongside Visa, China AMC Hong Kong, and Fidelity International for cross-border fund investment, using Chainlink's Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) to link its private blockchain to public Ethereum. In May 2026, ANZ ran a tokenised corporate bond pilot as part of Project Acacia, the Reserve Bank of Australia and Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre's (DFCRC) wholesale tokenisation programme, using wholesale CBDC for interbank settlement. The programme tested 20 use cases across chains including Hedera, XRP Ledger, and Ethereum, with 12 of those running as live pilots using real money.

Regional implications: Africa and South Asia

The consortium's membership carries geographic weight beyond the headline banks. FirstRand, South Africa's second-largest banking group by assets, and First Abu Dhabi Bank are both participants. FirstRand's subsidiary FNB operates across 13 African markets, where the South African Reserve Bank puts the cost to send $200 to Sub-Saharan Africa at close to 8 percent. Stablecoins already account for roughly 43 percent of all crypto transaction volume in Sub-Saharan Africa, largely because bank-rail alternatives have been too slow and expensive for everyday use. If FirstRand embeds tokenised deposits into its corporate treasury services, the effect on intra-African trade finance timelines could be meaningful. Direct benefits for unbanked populations remain limited in the short term, as tokenised deposits require a bank account to access, and approximately 57 percent of Sub-Saharan Africa's population remains unbanked.

For South Asia, the more significant shift is structural. Australia's remittance market reached USD $30 billion in 2025 across 33 million annual transactions, and the corridor to India is one of Australia's two highest-volume routes. ANZ's initiative targets institutional clients, not the individuals who send remittances home through services like Wise or Instarem at costs well below 1 percent. But compressing wholesale settlement costs and eliminating time-zone delays at the institutional layer creates downward pressure on the correspondent banking fees that underpin retail remittance pricing over the longer term. A converging development amplifies this picture: India is actively interlinking its UPI payment system with international rails, including Singapore's PayNow and Gulf payment networks, a parallel shift that could accelerate the structural impact on the Australia-India corridor specifically.

What comes next

The Swift pilot sits alongside the Bank for International Settlements' Project Agorá, which involves seven central banks and 40 financial institutions testing integration between private tokenised deposits and wholesale central bank digital currency. In Australia, the RBA is launching a follow-on programme to Project Acacia. The DFCRC has estimated that broad digital finance adoption could add approximately A$24 billion, roughly 1 percent of GDP, to Australia's economy each year. Commonwealth Bank's Sophie Gilder, Managing Director Blockchain and Digital Assets, described the current moment plainly: "2026 is shaping up to be a breakthrough year. We've seen initial digital asset legislation pass, with more expected." Australia has begun establishing a two-tranche regulatory framework for digital assets, with further APRA powers expected later in 2026, providing the legislative foundation that institutions need to deploy tokenised products at scale. A parallel initiative in the United States, led by The Clearing House, is targeting a tokenised deposit network among major US banks by 2027. The question now is not whether tokenised corporate banking rails will be built, but how quickly they will reach the smaller markets and businesses that have the most to gain from them.