Wall Street is building tokenized deposits to lock in customer balances

Imagine your company has enough money to pay a supplier, but the money is in its Singapore account and the bill must be paid from New York. If the transfer between those accounts has to wait until Monday, having enough cash overall doesn't solve the immediate problem.Businesses work around this by moving money early or keeping extra cash in accounts where they might need it. Both tie up money that could be used elsewhere, and sometimes a company even borrows in one country while its own cash is available in another.Banks want to make those transfers easier. On Sept. 5, DBS and Citi's New York office completed a dollar payment between Singapore and the US in minutes, according to DBS's announcement. To achieve that, they used tokenized deposits, a way of recording bank deposits as digital tokens, through SWIFT's digital ledger.The announcement describes the payment route, and the banks still haven't disclosed the amount or established that every customer can use it. But it gives them a concrete example of the service they want to sell: moving company money across borders when customers need it, including on weekends.Banks are doing this because it's potentially a very lucrative deal...