All news is rigorously fact-checked and reviewed by leading blockchain experts and seasoned industry insiders. - 17 banks across six continents are preparing to pilot live tokenized deposit transactions.
- Swift’s ledger supports 24/7 movement, including overnight and weekends, ahead of final settlement.
- CFTC Chairman Michael Selig says markets should prepare for “mass tokenization” and 24/7 finance.
IBM is building a bridge between banks’ existing payment systems and Swift’s blockchain-based ledger, giving financial institutions a way to instruct tokenized deposit transactions without replacing the infrastructure they already use. The new Digital Asset Haven integration uses ISO 20022 messages to connect conventional banking workflows with a network designed for always-on digital money.
The significance is less about putting another financial product on blockchain and more about interoperability. Banks already know how to tokenize deposits. The harder problem is making those deposits move between institutions while preserving the compliance, liquidity and risk controls attached to commercial-bank money.
IBM is targeting that middle layer.
ISO 20022 Becomes the Bridge to Tokenized Money
IBM Digital Asset Haven is adding a beta ISO 20022 Messaging Adapter that connects clients to Swift’s shared ledger. According to IBM, financial institutions can use standardized ISO 20022 messages to instruct tokenized deposit transactions while the adapter can also provide connectivity to other permissioned blockchain networks.
For banks, that reduces an important integration hurdle.
ISO 20022 is already embedded across modern payment infrastructure. Instead of requiring operations teams to interact directly with blockchain-specific systems, the adapter translates familiar financial messaging into workflows capable of interacting with tokenized assets.
Digital Asset Haven provides the technology layer for managing those assets and transactions. Swift supplies the interbank infrastructure.
That division of labor matters because institutional tokenization is increasingly becoming an integration problem rather than a proof-of-concept problem. A digital deposit has limited utility if it works only inside the bank that issued it.
24/7 Movement Is Not Yet 24/7 Final Settlement
The distinction between movement and settlement is crucial to understanding Swift’s model.
Swift says its ledger provides an orchestration layer for bank-issued tokenized deposits held on participating banks’ own ledgers. Funds can move for customers outside conventional banking hours, including overnight and on weekends, before final settlement is completed through existing systems.
The blockchain therefore does not replace the entire payment chain.
Instead, it validates and synchronizes interbank payment commitments while allowing banks to retain existing compliance, credit, risk and control processes. Swift has described the architecture as a way to connect established and emerging payment ecosystems rather than create an isolated blockchain network.
This hybrid design also explains the potential liquidity benefit.
Cross-border money often moves across institutions operating in different time zones and settlement windows.
An always-available coordination layer can allow payment instructions and tokenized value to progress while conventional systems would otherwise be closed.
The practical test will be whether that flexibility translates into lower liquidity buffers, better cash-flow visibility or faster access to funds once the system operates at greater scale.
Swift Brings Something Blockchain Startups Cannot Easily Replicate
Swift’s strongest asset in tokenized finance may not be its ledger at all.
Its network already connects 12,500 financial institutions across more than 200 markets, according to IBM. Swift separately reports 40,000 active payment corridors and an average of 59.8 million daily payment messages in 2025.
That distribution gives the project a different starting point from a new blockchain trying to attract banks one institution at a time.
Swift developed the shared ledger with feedback from more than 40 financial institutions and moved it from announcement to initial use in nine months. Its first application is intentionally narrow: cross-border payments using tokenized commercial-bank deposits.
The deposits remain liabilities of the banks issuing them. Corporate customers therefore do not have to exchange their bank balances for a separately issued stablecoin to access the new infrastructure.
The objective is to give existing commercial-bank money some of the functionality associated with blockchain-native assets while keeping it inside regulated banking relationships.
That makes interoperability the central challenge. A tokenized deposit becomes substantially more useful when another bank can recognize, coordinate and transact with it.
IBM Is Tackling the Infrastructure Banks Keep Behind Their Walls
IBM is addressing another obstacle at the same time.
Digital Asset Haven is expanding into an on-premises beta, allowing institutions to deploy the platform inside their own data centers on IBM Z or LinuxONE rather than depending entirely on public-cloud infrastructure.
IBM says the platform supports capabilities including wallet management, transaction orchestration, hardware-backed key protection and offline signing.
Those details are less visible than 24/7 payments, but they are central to institutional adoption.
For a regulated financial institution, the question is not simply whether blockchain can transfer an asset. Banks also need to determine where cryptographic keys reside, who controls transaction authorization, how activity is audited and whether sensitive operations can remain within internal infrastructure.
On-premises deployment gives institutions another way to meet those requirements while still connecting to external digital-asset networks.
IBM is effectively positioning Digital Asset Haven between a bank’s internal controls and the growing number of tokenized financial systems outside them.
The CFTC Is Preparing for the Same Change in Market Hours
The shift toward always-on infrastructure is also reaching U.S. market regulation.
CFTC Chairman Michael Selig said at the U.S. Treasury Market Conference on September 22 that regulators need to prepare markets for “mass tokenization”, onchain finance and 24/7 operation. He argued that tokenized assets could eventually support near-instant settlement and real-time movement of collateral among clearinghouses, intermediaries and end users.
Selig did not argue that every financial market should simply remain open continuously. His remarks noted growing interest in 24/7 trading while emphasizing that regulatory frameworks still need to account for the characteristics of individual markets.
The broader infrastructure problem is clear.
Continuous trading becomes more difficult when the money and collateral supporting those trades remain constrained by conventional operating hours. Exchanges can keep screens running all weekend, but that does not automatically make banking, clearing, collateral management and settlement operate on the same clock.
Tokenized commercial-bank money could help narrow that mismatch.
The Bigger Test Comes After Tokenization
The first wave of institutional blockchain projects established that deposits, bonds and other financial assets could be represented digitally.
The next phase has a harder objective: making those assets work across institutions and alongside infrastructure that will not disappear simply because blockchain has arrived.
IBM’s Swift integration is designed around that reality.
Banks can retain ISO 20022 messaging, existing controls and their own deposit liabilities while adding connectivity to a shared blockchain layer. Swift, meanwhile, can extend digital-asset functionality across a network that already sits at the center of global cross-border payments.
Neither company needs blockchain to replace traditional banking for the model to work.
What matters now is whether the early banking group can turn continuous tokenized payments into measurable improvements in liquidity, cross-border availability and operational efficiency. Those results will provide a more useful benchmark than the number of institutions experimenting with blockchain.
If that happens, the most consequential part of tokenization may become increasingly difficult for customers to see: digital money moving continuously while the banking infrastructure underneath it remains largely familiar.
