DBS and Citi completed an instant cross-border USD payment between Singapore and New York using tokenised deposits over Swift's Digital Ledger, the banks announced September 7. The transaction — executed by DBS and Citi's New York office on September 5 — took place over a weekend, outside conventional banking-system hours, and was completed in minutes.
The payment used Swift Digital Ledger infrastructure to bridge traditional banking rails with an emerging digital settlement network, rather than routing exclusively through either system. Transaction value was not disclosed.
The move builds on DBS's existing Token Services suite, launched in 2024, and its Treasury Tokens pilot with Ant International. Citi and DBS framed the transaction as evidence that tokenised money is moving "from experimentation to real-world adoption," pointing to projections of roughly $24 trillion in Asia's outbound cross-border payments by 2033 as the scale of opportunity driving continued investment in this infrastructure.