Opinion: this column reflects the author’s own analysis and argued position.
I think corporate treasurers will adopt tokenised money fastest when they never have to look at a token. The first live cross-border payment ANZ ran on Swift’s ledger points that way, and the stablecoin rulebook now taking shape at the Fed points the same way for a different reason.
What ANZ and BHP ran
On September 30, ANZ announced that it had completed US dollar payments between Melbourne and New York with BHP, Swift and Citi, using tokenised deposits and Swift’s blockchain ledger. BHP used its existing ANZ account and banking channel. The ledger and the tokenised deposits worked behind the scenes. ANZ says it is the first Australian bank to use Swift’s ledger, and that the payments were designed to minimise customer friction.
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Nigel Dobson, ANZ’s Executive General Manager for Payments Services, put the intent plainly. “These payments demonstrate how tokenised deposits can move between banks through shared industry infrastructure and supporting more efficient liquidity while remaining completely invisible to customers,” Dobson said in the release.
Why invisibility is the product
A treasury team already has accounts, approval chains, bank connectivity and audit procedures. Each new instrument asks for changes to all four. ANZ says its goal was to test how the benefits of new ledger technology “can be delivered through the existing banking arrangements,” using the accounts, channels and operational processes institutional customers already rely on. A payment that arrives sooner on the same screen asks for no new approvals, no new custody and no new vendor onboarding.
Compare that with the path for a token the customer holds. On September 24 the Federal Reserve Board requested public comment on two proposals for Board-supervised payment stablecoin issuers under the GENIUS Act. One covers reserve and risk management: full backing with permissible reserve assets such as short-term Treasury bills, capital requirements for credit and operational risk, and rules for safekeeping reserves. The other sets an application process in which banks submit business plans and financial documentation, with appeals and hearings. Each has a 60-day comment period after Federal Register publication.
None of that is a criticism of the Fed. Rules like these are what a stablecoin market needs. My argument is about the buyer. A treasurer who holds stablecoin balances has to understand a reserve policy and an issuer. A treasurer whose bank settles through a shared ledger has to understand nothing new, and the bank carries the rule-following. Between those two, the second is the easier purchase, and I expect it to win the first large corporate volumes.
The strongest counter-argument
A skeptic will say invisibility is a weakness. If the customer cannot see the ledger, the customer cannot tell whether payments are actually faster, cheaper or safer, and the bank gets to claim the benefits without proving them. That is a fair concern, and BHP’s Marlon Singh, Manager for Treasury, said himself that the effort is “still at an early stage.” The release describes the potential for faster, seven-days-a-week processing and does not publish settlement times.
My answer is that the concern argues for measurement, and measurement is easier inside a design the customer already trusts. A treasurer can compare a bank’s cut-off and settlement times before and after because the account and channel stay the same. A treasurer comparing a bank account to a stablecoin wallet is comparing two different products on custody, rules and cost at once. Invisibility leaves one variable to check.
What treasurers should ask
Treasury teams talking to their banks about tokenised deposits should ask three things. What settlement time did the pilot payments achieve, and on which days. What changes, if anything, in the account terms or cut-offs. And which institutions’ tokenised deposits can the ledger connect to, since ANZ says Swift’s ledger can link deposits issued by different institutions. The answers decide whether a pilot becomes a product, and each one can be checked against the bank’s own account terms.
I would watch for the second round. A pilot that publishes numbers and adds banks will make this case better than I can. Earlier coverage of the bank-first route is in our piece on tokenized deposits and a trusted on-ramp, and our look at banks testing USDC inside existing payment systems covers the hybrid case.
Source: ANZ
