Citi said this month it has moved real money on Swift's new blockchain ledger, which lets banks move funds overnight and on weekends. Nikkei reported this week that Swift has begun trials of the ledger with Japanese institutions among the participants.
On 9 July 2026, Swift said its blockchain-based ledger was "ready for initial use, enabling early adopter financial institutions to support 24/7 cross-border payments with tokenised deposits." Tokenised deposits are bank deposits recorded as tokens on a ledger. Seventeen banks across six continents signed on to pilot it, including Citi, HSBC and MUFG Bank. On 2 September, Citi said it had processed live transactions on the ledger with First Abu Dhabi Bank and OCBC, in what it described as "a focused, controlled proof-of-concept phase running from July to December 2026."
For everyone working on cross-border payments, including us, this means payments between banks can start running on weekends.
What the ledger does
Swift says the ledger "provides participating banks with a secure orchestration layer for bank-issued tokenised deposits on their own ledgers, enabling them to move funds for customers, including overnight and on weekends, before completing final settlement through existing systems." In plain terms, it is a shared system that tells each bank what to move.
The architecture is conservative by design. Swift runs the shared system and checks that each bank has the funds it commits. The banks keep their own systems, their own keys and their own assets. They settle finally through central bank settlement systems or correspondent banking, as they do today. Swift went from design to launch in about nine months, with feedback from more than 30 institutions.
The press coverage adds two things the primary releases do not support. MUFG is on the pilot list, but its only on-record statement describes "advancing the exploration" and "piloting and evaluating practical use cases." That is short of live transactions. And the coverage frames the ledger as lowering fees. Swift's releases claim speed, weekend and overnight availability, liquidity efficiency and less reconciliation. They do not promise cheaper payments.
Why this is worth welcoming
Swift connects more than 11,500 institutions across 200 countries. It has now put its name on a simple position: value should move when a customer needs it, not when a branch is open. Thierry Chilosi, Swift's chief business officer, framed it as "extending the trust and stability of established finance into the frontiers of digital money."
Every bank board still deciding whether tokenised settlement is a serious topic now has an answer from the most conservative possible source. Risk committees that would not hear a pitch from a fintech will hear it from Swift. The set of institutions that can safely take part gets wider.
It also settles an argument about form. Swift's position is that the ledger supports regulated tokenised value and that the choice of token belongs to commercial and central banks. Tokenised deposits and regulated stablecoins are two forms of the same dollar, and the useful question is whether a payment arrives.
Where businesses still wait
Swift says 75 percent of payments on its network reach the recipient's bank within 10 minutes, often in seconds.
The exporter waits on either side of that transfer between banks. A US client's payment sits until a cut-off. Dollars arrive at a bank and reach the business's account later. The bank converts on its own schedule, at a rate the business learns afterward. A 24/7 ledger between banks, running as a controlled pilot among 17 banks through December, still leaves an agency in Manila or Guadalajara waiting on Friday for a payment that left New York on Wednesday.
That step from the bank to the business is where the work is, and it is the step we run today.
A client in the United States or Europe pays into an account issued in our customer's own name. Between receipt and payout, we settle the value as 1:1 US dollar-backed stablecoins, which is why it does not wait on a batch window. Licensed local partners pay out the pesos or other local currency over the domestic rails people already use. Dollars land as dollars, and the business decides when to convert. We explain it in more detail in how dollars move and in what we support for international payments across the markets on our country coverage page.
Where Swift's work and ours meet
The industry is converging on the same destination from different ends. Swift and its member banks are rebuilding the transfer between banks so value can move at any hour. We are building the step from the bank to the business, so a business that earns dollars abroad can receive them, hold them and spend them without waiting on somebody's cut-off.
Those two efforts meet. When bank deposits move as tokens on an always-on ledger and the receiving side is already always-on, the exporter gets what the rest of their software already gives them. Getting there rewards the institutions that do it with supervision, licences and records.
If you are at a bank working through what tokenised settlement means for your business customers, we would enjoy the conversation. You can find us through the Philippines page or anywhere else on the site.
Quotations above are from Swift's press releases of 29 September 2025, 30 March 2026 and 9 July 2026, and Citi's press release of 2 September 2026. Swift is a trademark of S.W.I.F.T. SC, used here to refer to the company and its announcements.
