For fifty years Swift has carried messages between banks. Now it wants to handle the money too. Its blockchain-based ledger is live, which puts the cooperative on the same turf as mBridge, Nexus and dollar stablecoins.
“Our blockchain-based ledger announced at Sibos 2025 is now live. By the end of 2026, at least 19 banks are expected to use it across five major currencies to power always-on payments with tokenised deposits,” chief executive Javier Pérez-Tasso told the opening plenary at Sibos in Miami.
Real transactions began over the summer. A first version went out in July with 17 banks lined up for pilots. In August, HSBC and Standard Chartered made the first live cross-border tokenised deposit payment on the ledger. DBS and OCBC have since cleared US dollar transfers with Citi, and DBS, OCBC and UOB have run the first domestic Singapore dollar payments.
It is a cautious move. The ledger records and nets what banks owe each other, but final settlement still goes through central bank payment systems or correspondent accounts.
Reach is Swift’s big advantage: more than 11,500 institutions in over 200 countries and territories. Competitors aren’t trying to match that. They want to make it less important.
The Challengers
In June the Financial Times reported that China was readying a commercial launch of mBridge, a platform backed by the central banks of mainland China, Hong Kong, Thailand, the UAE and Saudi Arabia. People close to the project said a Hong Kong-based entity would operate it, and that volumes had reached about 470 billion yuan, roughly $69 billion. Atlantic Council figures from January show the digital yuan accounting for about 95% of settlement. The Bank for International Settlements, which helped design mBridge, handed it over to its central bank partners in 2024.
Washington has picked a different tool. When the GENIUS Act became law, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said stablecoins would “buttress the dollar’s status as the global reserve currency.” Alisha Chhangani of the Atlantic Council doubts mBridge will take on the dollar directly, though she says it “may incrementally erode it.”
Asia has its own plan. Central banks in India, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand set up Nexus Global Payments to connect their instant payment systems, aiming for production in 2027. The Eurosystem is studying a direct link between its TIPS platform and India’s UPI.
Tom Keatinge of RUSI told the FT there is an “alternative financial systems arms race” going on quietly in the background. It comes down to control. Whoever runs the pipes sees the data, sets the access rules and decides which currencies travel easily.
Customers Are Still Waiting
End users have seen little of this. In 2021 the G20 endorsed targets for cross-border payments, most of them due by the end of 2027. One says 75% of retail payments should reach the recipient within an hour.
The FSB’s latest progress report, from October 2025, found just 35.4% of retail services met that mark. It attributed most of the small improvement to changes in its sample, and called satisfactory global progress by 2027 unlikely.
Prices are stuck too. Sending a $200 remittance still costs about 6.5% on average, and currency conversion is the biggest charge in retail cross-border payments. The FSB points to stubborn obstacles:
- misaligned anti-money laundering controls and privacy rules
- poorly implemented capital controls
- thin competition in some market segments
A new ledger fixes none of these.
Direct links have worked better. Once Singapore and Thailand connected PayNow and PromptPay, fees and exchange margins on that route fell from an average of 13% to under 3%.
What Banks Face
Tokenised deposits got more airtime at Sibos than stablecoins, though most banks were still working out which instrument suits which job rather than choosing one. If payments break into rival systems, lenders will need to join several, each with its own rules, data standards and political risk. More choice can push prices down, but it also splits liquidity and raises compliance bills. Mid-sized banks without the budget to plug into everything will feel that most.
Regulators want common ground and are pressing providers to adopt harmonised ISO 20022 data requirements by the end of 2027. Project Agorá leans the same way. Eight central banks and more than 40 financial firms are testing tokenised reserves and deposits on one shared platform, and participants made real-value payments in July. The public sector clearly wants banks to stay at the centre of the flow.
For customers, improvement will come route by route. Some corridors will get quicker and cheaper while others stay the same for years. Corporate treasurers face a tougher call: which system to trust when a corridor turns political. The winner won’t be the fastest. It’ll be the one everyone else has to connect to.
