SINGAPORE, Oct 28 (Reuters) – Global adoption of tokenised money is moving faster than expected among businesses looking to improve liquidity management and access new markets, a top executive from Singapore bank DBS said.
The remarks by Lim Soon Chong, the group head of global transaction services, follow a survey by the lender that showed that 88% of businesses have deployed or are piloting tokenised money use cases.
• Conducted between June and July, the survey polled 422 global business and finance leaders from organisations with annual revenue exceeding $500 million across 11 markets including the US, UK, Australia, China and Germany
• Roughly two-thirds of respondents said their businesses had either fully deployed tokenised money at scale or begun using it in selected locations
• Stablecoins were the most widely adopted tokenised instrument at 63%, followed by tokenised deposits at 53% and tokenised money market funds at 52%
• “Our interpretation is that there are significant benefits that stablecoins offer,” said Lim
• “Stablecoins, as you know, offer better fungibility across payment intermediaries, not just across banks. They are less cumbersome from a permissioning standpoint,” he said
• The survey found Southeast Asia was the top destination for businesses looking to expand into new markets, followed by Australia and New Zealand, with India ranking third
• More than half of respondents in both Australia and the UK said they were considering using the Chinese renminbi for trade settlement over the next one to two years
• The renminbi’s recent appreciation is making renminbi settlement more attractive to Chinese exporters, who are increasingly offering better commercial terms for transactions denominated in the currency, DBS said
• “The Chinese authorities are clearly pushing the internationalisation of the renminbi, so we expect this to go up,” Lim said
(Reporting by Rae Wee; Editing by Sonali Paul)
