(25 September 2025 – Hong Kong) HSBC has expanded its Tokenised Deposit Service (TDS) offering to enable corporate clients to securely execute cross border payments.
Leveraging distributed ledger technology (DLT), the London headquartered lender conducted its inaugural cross border US dollar transaction for Ant International between Hong Kong and Singapore.
The TDS allows clients to manage and move funds across participating HSBC locations in real-time, 24/7 by converting deposits into digital tokens (1:1, or one token for every dollar), enabling instant wallet-to-wallet transfers to attain 100 percent cash visibility and control within HSBC’s network.
HSBC says the platform will also support programmability, enabling conditional payments and the settlement of tokenised assets.
The cross border transaction builds on existing product capability for the group already available for domestic payments first launched in Hong Kong and Singapore in Q1 2025. The solution has been extended to the United Kingdom (UK) and Luxembourg to support other currencies including GBP Sterling and Euro with plans in place to scale the service further across key markets.
Cross border treasury has traditionally been characterised by frustrating delays, time zone frictions and inhibitive costs, especially for exotic currency pairs with wide spreads. Tokenised deposits cut through these pain points with 24/7, instant settlement across top global currencies.
While SMEs in emerging markets have turned to USD stablecoins, global corporates can now tap bank-issued tokenised deposits for scale, security and efficiency.
“Tokenised deposits represent a major step forward in the future of transaction banking and open new opportunities for our clients. The future of high value cross border payments will be tokenised deposits based” commented HSBC Head of Global Payments Solutions, Manish Kohli.
“We’ve been working with Ant International for quite a few years. It all started from a unique demand from the clients, which is to move money in a much more efficient, secure, and compliant manner, exactly aligning to what we do in HSBC. Ant always provides us with very innovative ideas” said HSBC Global Head of Domestic and Emerging Payments Managing Director, Lewis Sun.
“The TDS is one of the main means to enable us to do real time payments globally and also enable us to achieve real time treasury management on a global basis” stated Ant International GM of Platform Technology, Kelvin Li.