ANZ Becomes First Australian Bank to Execute Live Cross-Border Tokenised Deposit Transaction on Swift's Ledger
ANZ Becomes First Australian Bank to Execute Live Cross-Border Tokenised Deposit Transaction on Swift’s Ledger #
ANZ Bank has become the first Australian institution to complete a live cross-border corporate treasury transaction on Swift’s blockchain ledger, executing a US dollar payment between Melbourne and New York alongside mining company BHP and Citi.
The transaction, announced on 30 September, brought together ANZ as the originating bank, BHP as the corporate client, Citi as the receiving institution, and Swift as the shared infrastructure provider. According to ANZ’s announcement, the payment was structured to avoid disrupting BHP’s existing banking arrangements: BHP used its standard ANZ account and regular banking channel, while the tokenised deposit and distributed ledger mechanics ran in the background.
Tokenised deposits are digital representations of conventional bank deposits. The underlying funds remain held at a bank in the customer’s name; a digital token recorded on a shared ledger stands in for that deposit, allowing banks to move or settle claims faster and with a cleaner audit trail. The currency value itself does not change.
ANZ Executive General Manager for Payments Services Nigel Dobson said the results confirmed that tokenised deposits “can move between banks through shared industry infrastructure” while remaining entirely invisible to end customers. BHP Manager for Treasury Marlon Singh described the opportunity as “the ability to move funds across borders in real time,” adding that early-stage initiatives of this kind have the potential to simplify liquidity management for multinationals operating across jurisdictions.
Citi’s Head of Services for Japan, Asia North and Australia, Kanika Thakur, said the transaction demonstrated “the power of a shared blockchain ledger to deliver infrastructure fit for the future by enabling interoperability between traditional and digital finance and networks.”
ANZ is the first Asia-Pacific bank to go live on Swift’s ledger, following a similar transaction completed by HSBC and Standard Chartered in August. Swift has said that 17 banks across six continents are now preparing to pilot live transactions on the infrastructure. The initiative is aimed at enabling settlement outside business hours, which today’s correspondent banking model does not support.
The transaction routes tokenised value through existing bank-to-bank infrastructure rather than building a parallel system. The parties involved said that design makes adoption more feasible for corporate treasuries that want to use the technology without overhauling existing banking relationships or operational processes, a constraint that has slowed earlier blockchain pilots in wholesale finance.
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