DBS: 88% of Large Companies Already Use or Are Testing Tokenized Money

An EY survey for DBS of 422 finance leaders at companies with revenues of more than 500 million, across 11 markets. 24% already have it deployed at scale.

Stablecoins are the most used or planned instrument (63%), ahead of tokenized deposits (53%) and tokenized money market funds (52%). Two out of three want their bank to be their single gateway.

Singapore-based bank DBS and consulting firm EY asked 422 finance executives at large companies how they move their money in a world increasingly split into blocs. The answer: with more currencies, more artificial intelligence and, increasingly, with tokenized money.

Imagine you run treasury for a car manufacturer in Jakarta. In the morning, a payment to a Vietnamese supplier gets stuck at a correspondent bank. At noon, the rupiah moves just enough to throw off your cash forecast. And in the afternoon, the legal department warns you that one of your customers could end up on a sanctions list. That ordinary day is what is portrayed in “The Great Rewiring: Money in a New Order”, the report DBS commissioned from EY.

Who was asked

The respondents are CFOs and finance and treasury heads at companies with annual revenues of more than 500 million dollars, spread across eleven markets in Asia, Europe and North America. People who move real money every day.

More currencies, more routes and less visibility

Global trade no longer flows along the usual highways. Companies are opening new markets (Southeast Asia tops the list), leaving others and planning route by route. That multiplies the currencies they work with: the yuan is gaining ground as a settlement currency in Asia and is starting to draw interest in Australia and the United Kingdom.

The price of that diversification is losing sight of the money. The more banks and currencies involved, the harder it is for them to know in real time where the cash is, and many reconciliations are still done by hand.

Tokenized money leaves the lab

Nearly nine out of ten respondents are testing, piloting or already using tokenized money, and most expect to see benefits in less than two years. Stablecoins attract the most interest, ahead of tokenized deposits, tokenized money market funds and central bank digital currencies. Cryptocurrencies trail well behind.

What they are looking for is to settle international payments instantly, outside banking hours and with every transaction traceable on a blockchain. Brian Chen, CFO of Taiwan’s ADATA, describes his approach as “prudent but progressive”: for now they use it to collect payments in markets with unstable currencies.

What holds them back is not the technology, which they trust. It is regulatory uncertainty, security and a lack of staff who know how to integrate it with their systems. Artificial intelligence is following a similar path: it is moving beyond experiments to focus on specific tasks such as tracking payments or forecasting cash.

The report is best read knowing who pays for it. It was commissioned by a bank, and its conclusion is that companies need banks as a gateway to tokenized money. That may be true, but it is not a neutral conclusion. Nor is it a snapshot of the world: eight of the eleven markets are in Asia-Pacific, and the claim that one in four companies already has it deployed at scale strikes me as optimistic.

Even so, there is one significant finding. If treasurers at large companies prefer stablecoins to central bank digital currencies, the debate is no longer theoretical. And if the main obstacle is regulation, rules such as MiCA in Europe will set the pace more than any technical breakthrough.

A note for those of us watching Latin America: the region ranks last among the five expansion priorities. There is work to be done there.