Asia’s financial architecture is evolving, moving to align with the demands of an increasingly digital and real-time economy.

 

As multinational corporates face increasingly fragmented regulatory environments and round-the-clock operating models, their treasury functions are under pressure to deliver speed, visibility, and control, all without adding to their existing operational burden.

 

Amid this complexity, a new tool is emerging: tokenised deposits, a form of commercial bank money issued on blockchain, programmable, fully regulated, and designed for real-time settlement.

 

These aren't speculative digital assets, they are fiat-backed, compliance-integrated instruments issued by licensed banks, with one goal: unlocking liquidity, instantly and securely.

 

HSBC recently went live with its Tokenised Deposit Service ( TDS ) in Hong Kong and Singapore, Asia’s two biggest treasury hubs. The service enables 24/7 fund transfers between corporate wallets, and is already being used by Ant International to move internal liquidity across time zones and currencies.

 

“Finance teams don’t want to work 24/7,” says Lewis Sun, global head of domestic and emerging payments at HSBC. “But they want their systems to operate in real time, even during non-office hours. That’s the shift we’re enabling.”

 

 

The launch of tokenised deposits responds directly to a treasury reality playing out across Asia: trapped cash and operational inefficiencies.

 

During a recent treasury forum organized by Standard Chartered and facilitated by The Asset, practitioners from leading corporates painted a consistent picture, one of cash held hostage by local rules, delayed by documentation, or fragmented across multiple systems.

 

This type of inefficiency, while not just operationally expensive, but strategically limiting, explains the growing appeal of real-time digital liquidity.

 

Traditional cross-border payments are often routed through SWIFT, a secure but inherently batch-based network. With SWIFT it can take three days with a stablecoin, three seconds. It’s this expectation of speed and simplicity that tokenised deposits are engineered to meet.

 

“Our tokenised deposit service was built from day one as a digital-native platform with full API connectivity,” explains HSBC’s Sun. “It’s integrated with our core banking and compliance systems. It’s not just an experiment, it’s production-ready.”

 

The service lets corporate clients move funds around the clock, eliminating pre-funding delays and cutting off-hours manual processing. This enables better liquidity utilization, reduces risk buffers, and allows treasurers to operate across time zones with confidence.

 

A key feature of the new offering is its ease of integration. While the service is powered by blockchain, clients don’t need to overhaul their treasury systems or manage wallets themselves.

 

CFOs and treasury leaders increasingly expect digital liquidity solutions to be seamless and infrastructure-light, funds should move cross-border without requiring complex technical setup or separate systems. The ideal scenario is integration within existing banking portals, eliminating the need for manual intervention or parallel platforms.

 

This thinking reflects a wider shift toward embedded treasury, where liquidity tools are integrated into ERP systems and automated workflows, rather than running on parallel tracks. Tokenised deposits align with that shift by being programmable, secure, and plug-and-play.

 

 

As treasuries invest in AI, automation, and real-time data, tokenised deposits complement these efforts by digitising not just the visibility of cash—but the cash itself.

 

Programmability means corporates can pre-authorise fund flows, automate reconciliation, or embed liquidity logic directly into smart contracts—reducing manual effort and compliance lag.

 

And because these deposits are fully backed and held within the bank’s balance sheet, they satisfy both regulatory requirements and internal risk frameworks.

 

Today, most tokenised deposit platforms are bank-specific. A client of Bank A cannot yet settle with a client of Bank B using tokenised deposits. This limits network effects—and solving it is the next frontier.

 

“Interoperability is critical, not just across banks, but across different forms of digital money,” says Sun. “From CBDCs to stablecoins to tokenised deposits, these all need to talk to each other. That’s where we see central banks playing a role.”

 

HSBC is participating in the Hong Kong Monetary Authority’s Project Ensemble, an initiative to build interoperability layers for digital money systems. Meanwhile, institutions like BEA are also piloting tokenised deposit solutions under the Universal Digital Payments Network ( UDPN ), testing cross-bank, cross-chain flows.

 

In an environment where regulatory clarity is improving, blockchain infrastructure is maturing, and CFOs are demanding liquidity without latency, tokenised deposits are emerging as a timely solution, not just for treasury, but for the broader evolution of banking.

 

“The most important thing,” says Sun, “is to drive liquidity in an accessible way, offering digitally native solutions that clients can adopt quickly.”