ANZ said on September 30 that it completed one of the world’s first live corporate treasury transactions using tokenised deposits and Swift’s ledger. The transaction brought together ANZ, BHP, Swift and Citi to complete US dollar payments between Melbourne and New York.
What happened
According to ANZ’s release, ANZ is the first Australian bank to use Swift’s blockchain ledger. BHP made the payments through its existing ANZ account and banking channel, while tokenised deposits and the ledger worked behind the scenes. ANZ says the payments showed how shared ledger technology could support faster, seven-days-a-week cross-border processing, and that the ledger can connect tokenised deposits issued by different institutions.
Nigel Dobson, ANZ’s Executive General Manager for Payments Services, said the payments show how tokenised deposits “can move between banks through shared industry infrastructure” while “remaining completely invisible to customers.”
Why it matters
The design choice stands out. ANZ describes its goal as testing how the benefits of new ledger technology can be delivered through the accounts, channels and operational processes that institutional customers already use. The corporate sees the same bank account it had before.
Our read
BHP’s Marlon Singh, Manager for Treasury, called the exercise a pilot and said it is “still at an early stage,” which is the right frame for a single set of payments. The release does not give a settlement time, a fee or a payment amount, so the claims on speed stay as potential. What the transaction does show is a route that does not ask a treasury team to change its bank account, a point we raised in our piece on tokenized deposits and bank on-ramps and in our coverage of banks testing USDC inside existing payment systems.
Source: ANZ
