Australia Tests Cross-Border Settlements Using Tokenized Deposits

Australia and New Zealand Banking Group (ANZ), one of Australia’s largest banks, successfully completed cross-border corporate payments in U.S. dollars using tokenized deposits in collaboration with Citi, Swift, and BHP, the world’s largest mining company.

As part of the project, BHP made payments through its existing ANZ account using standard banking channels. Meanwhile, tokenized deposit processing and interactions between financial institutions took place through Swift’s distributed ledger, without requiring any additional action from the client.

The trial demonstrated the potential of shared blockchain infrastructure to address several challenges, including:

• Enabling interoperability between tokenized deposits issued by different banks;

• Accelerating international settlements, with the potential for 24/7 payment processing;

• Improving corporate liquidity management without changing existing banking procedures.

Nigel Dobson, ANZ’s Executive General Manager of Payments Services, noted that tokenized deposits can move between banks through shared industry infrastructure, enabling more efficient liquidity management while remaining entirely invisible to customers.

ANZ has been testing the exchange of tokenized assets across different blockchain networks for several years. In 2024, the bank joined Project Guardian for this purpose and tested the coordination of tokenized asset transactions using a delivery-versus-payment (DvP) model through Chainlink’s cross-chain protocol.