UBS partners with Ant International to launch a tokenization bank deposit pilot in Singapore.

UBS ( officially signed a memorandum of cooperation with Ant International on 11/16 and launched a large-scale “tokenization of bank deposits” pilot in Singapore, aiming to solve the most troublesome latency issues in cross-border financial arrangements, allowing internal multinational remittances for enterprises to no longer be restricted by exchange cut-off times, multi-currency settlements, and different business hours in various countries.

UBS partners with Ant International to launch a new tokenization pilot in Singapore.

The cooperation between both parties takes place in Singapore, a global hub for institutional-level blockchain testing, to jointly promote the application of “tokenization of bank deposits” in cross-border payments and global liquidity management.

UBS intends to expand the usage of its digital currency platform “UBS Digital Cash” through this collaboration, while Ant International hopes to integrate the technology into Alipay+ for cross-border financial operations, making the transfer of accounts between subsidiaries in different countries more efficient.

Tokenization cooperation focuses on three main goals to enhance the efficiency of cross-border capital flow transmission.

UBS's cooperation with Ant International focuses on three goals:

Create instant cross-border payments

Synchronize Management of Multi-Currency Liquidity

Digital bank deposits replace traditional cross-border settlement processes.

This cooperation is regarded as one of the most concrete, practical, and largest multinational “tokenization deposit” business cases at present, which is expected to improve the processing speed of cross-border capital flow from “several days” to “several minutes.”

Cross-border scheduling is restricted, and the latency in currency exchange and settlement has become the biggest pain point.

Both parties stated that they observed that when subsidiaries in different countries within the group need to remit funds to each other, they are often restricted by the operating hours and cut-off times of traditional banking systems, as well as the settlement speed of different currencies. This kind of cross-border cash flow transfer within the enterprise seems simple, but because it involves the financial systems of different countries, it takes several days to process.

Therefore, UBS and Ant International hope to improve this pain point through “tokenization of deposits” by placing bank deposits on an authorized digital ledger, allowing funds to be synchronized across different countries of the group within minutes, avoiding delays caused by traditional processes.

The core of bank issuance, UBS Digital Cash 2024 has completed its pilot.

UBS Digital Cash has already conducted preliminary trials with some institutional clients in 2024, positioning itself as a digital currency issued by banks for institutional use. This collaboration with Ant International is the most concrete and largest cross-border application case for this platform.

For Ant Group, if officially implemented in the future, it will allow companies in various regions such as Asia, Europe, and the Middle East to transform their financial processes from traditional “manual reconciliation” to “programmable settlement” that can be configured with conditions and automatically processed by the system, thereby reducing latency in internal accounting and cross-border fund management.

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This article discusses how UBS has partnered with Ant International to launch a tokenization bank deposit pilot in Singapore, first appearing in Chain News ABMedia.