Week ending 12 July 2026

A joint statement from the People's Bank of China, the HKMA and the SFC on 7 July frames a new fixed-income and currency (FIC) trading platform for Hong Kong with top-level central bank and regulator backing, the clearest cross-border market-infrastructure signal Hong Kong has issued this year. The architecture and go-live detail are not yet public, but the PBOC's presence on the announcement points to onshore-offshore RMB flow as a design target rather than a purely domestic venue.

Paired with the FIC platform announcement, the HKMA package on 7 July advances tokenised bond issuance and offshore RMB business as a coordinated market-development agenda, with the HKMA, HKEX and SFC named. Implementation specifics are pending, so this reads as programme direction rather than an enacted settlement rule, but it confirms tokenised bonds sit at the centre of Hong Kong's next infrastructure build.

The FSA is clearing the way for foreign investors to buy Japanese security tokens, which to date have been dominated by real estate and a handful of corporate bonds. The move widens the buyer base for a market that has been structurally domestic, and it dovetails with the settlement-platform plans SBI and Daiwa are building for exactly this cross-border demand.

Citi and Thailand's Siam Commercial Bank announced on 9 July that SCB is the first financial-institution client live on Citi's integrated 24/7 USD Clearing and Citi Token Services, the first time the tokenised-deposit rail and the interbank clearing network operate together for a third-party bank rather than only between Citi accounts. In the first transaction, SCB client Phillip Securities Thailand received dollars sent from a Citi London account belonging to affiliate Phillip Capital Inc over a US holiday weekend, while conventional US payment systems were closed. The two components solve different problems: 24/7 USD Clearing settles interbank payments as book transfers across USD accounts respondent banks hold with Citi in the US, and Citi Token Services tokenises corporate deposits so clients can mobilise funds held at other Citi branches into the clearing leg at any hour. This is operational participation, not a logo, and it puts Citi ahead of the multibank tokenised-deposit consortia still in build.

SBI Securities and Daiwa Securities are planning a settlement platform to let foreign investors buy Japanese security tokens, with Singapore as the first target market, approval from the Japan Securities Dealers Association secured, and a go-live targeted for 2027 at the earliest. Overseas settlement would use USDC initially, potentially a yen stablecoin later, and the platform is built on BOOSTRY rather than Progmat. The scope extends beyond real estate and corporate bonds to tokenised anime and sake, which signals the venture is chasing genuinely new asset supply rather than migrating existing issuance.

DDSC, the UAE dirham stablecoin backed by IHC, First Abu Dhabi Bank and Sirius International Holding, received a No Objection Certificate from the Central Bank of the UAE allowing distribution via selected VARA-regulated exchanges, extending it beyond institutional settlement toward retail and merchant payments. No exchanges were named and listings remain subject to meeting the NOC's requirements. The approval bridges two regimes, the central bank's Payment Token Services Regulation and VARA's oversight of Dubai trading venues, which is the operational precedent worth watching.

Global Digital Finance and ISDA published a report concluding that tokenised money-market funds can work as institutional collateral in the US under all three main tokenisation models, drawing on more than 300 participants from over 120 firms including BlackRock, Citi, JPMorgan and Franklin Templeton, with 48 firms in Ownera-run sandbox simulations. The analysis found the models fit existing US legal frameworks across ten dimensions, with two gaps: MMFs are not eligible as variation margin for cleared derivatives, which stays cash-only, and the SEC has issued no guidance on tokenised securities for uncleared initial margin. The report's cleanest contribution is a taxonomy keyed to which record of ownership is legally authoritative.

SS&C, the largest third-party transfer agent for mutual funds with more than 45 trillion dollars in assets running on its technology as of July 2026, said it is working on regulated digital cash for tokenised fund settlement, though the plans are early-stage with no named stablecoin or deposit network. Digital cash could support atomic settlement and delivery-versus-payment and simplify cross-border subscriptions, echoing the Daiwa-SBI cross-border settlement work. The reach matters more than the maturity here, given how much fund plumbing runs through SS&C after its Calastone acquisition.

The FCA published its final ruleset on 7 July, requiring all crypto firms including trading platforms, custodians, stablecoin issuers and staking arrangers to obtain authorisation, with applications open from 30 September 2026 to 28 February 2027 and the mandatory regime in force from 25 October 2027. Following consultation the FCA simplified capital requirements for stablecoin firms and tailored trading rules, and set specific stablecoin standards alongside market-integrity and financial-resilience rules. The regime sits alongside joint Bank of England supervision for systemic issuers, giving the UK a defined timeline that MiCA-authorised firms and US GENIUS Act issuers can now plan against.

The European Parliament approved the start of trilogue negotiations on the digital euro bill on 9 July by 416 votes to 169 with 22 abstentions, after right-of-centre groups forced the plenary vote by challenging the ECON committee's 23 June decision. The bill preserves both online and offline versions, includes holding caps, and requires most businesses to accept the digital euro with exemptions for smaller non-digital merchants, and basic functionality would be free while value-added services could carry charges. A first round of negotiations with the Irish Presidency is expected shortly.

The OCC granted Circle final approval on 10 July to establish a national trust bank, aligning its digital-asset infrastructure with the fiduciary standards of national trust banks and giving it a federal charter for institutional custody and settlement. This moves Circle from relying on state money-transmitter arrangements toward a supervised federal structure, which matters to institutions that require a chartered counterparty. The charter also strengthens Circle's hand as bank-led consortia and revenue-sharing challengers press on stablecoin economics.

Sony Bank secured preliminary conditional OCC approval on 9 July to establish a national trust bank through subsidiary Connectia Trust, with a planned US business including issuance and management of a dollar stablecoin and a 2027 launch target subject to further approvals in both Japan and the US. A direct US charter was the faster path, since Japan has yet to grant full approval to any trust-type stablecoin and a foreign coin would otherwise need a GENIUS Act substituted-compliance determination. The Japanese online bank has worked on stablecoins since early 2024, when it trialled yen-linked coins on Polygon.

The European Parliament adopted a digital-assets report on 9 July by 390 votes to 86 that wants stablecoin multi-issuance, where the same token is issued by both an EU and a non-EU entity, put on a sound legal footing with safeguards, directly contradicting the European Systemic Risk Board's September recommendation that MiCA does not permit it. Multi-issuance is how Circle already runs USDC, minting in the US and separately through its French entity with interchangeable tokens and split reserves. The report is non-binding, but its wording tends to resurface in binding law, and the timing is pointed given the MiCA review consultation runs to 30 September and a legislative proposal is expected in 2027.

The Bank of England, the PRA and the FCA began overseeing the first Critical Third Parties on Monday 13 July following designation by HM Treasury, a structural governance change bringing systemically important technology and infrastructure providers under direct financial-regulator supervision. For tokenisation infrastructure, this is the moment third-party providers of cloud, connectivity and shared ledger services move inside the supervisory perimeter rather than sitting beside it.

See the Regulatory and licensing desk above; the charter is equally a custody-infrastructure development, giving USDC holders a path to a federally supervised trust-bank custodian.

EDX Markets, backed by Charles Schwab, Citadel Securities, Fidelity Digital Assets, Paradigm, Sequoia and Virtu, closed a 76 million dollar Series C led by SBI Holdings on 7 July, funding expansion of its trading, clearing and settlement capabilities. The round caps a fortnight of SBI repositioning around regulated infrastructure, including its 46.7 billion yen agreement to acquire Bitbank and the wind-down of its Bitcoin mining pool. The consistent direction is SBI concentrating on regulated trading and settlement rails rather than producing the underlying asset, with chairman Yoshitaka Kitao pointing to the group's JPYSC yen stablecoin and its handling of RLUSD and USDC.

The Bank of England published its policy statement on the fees regime for financial-market-infrastructure supervision of central counterparties and central securities depositories for 2026/27, clarifying the supervisory-cost structure that UK tokenisation infrastructure participants operating as or through CCPs and CSDs will carry.

The UK launched its bond consolidated tape operated by ETS Connect UK, giving a single real-time source of prices and trades across the UK bond market for the first time, with 98 percent coverage of in-scope trading at launch. Building on December 2025 transparency rules that lifted real-time reporting of corporate bond trades from under 5 percent to over 75 percent and government bonds from around 30 percent to roughly 80 percent, the UK becomes the first country outside North America with a bond consolidated tape.

ESMA is launching a Common Supervisory Action assessing the digital operational resilience of crypto-asset service providers, with a specific focus on custody, running from the second half of 2026 into the first half of 2027 across a risk-based sample of authorised CASPs. National regulators will examine governance, key and storage management, transaction controls, incident response, smart-contract risk and third-party dependencies, with the exercise landing as the MiCA transition period closed and some large exchanges remained unlicensed. There are now 283 registered CASPs in the EU, more than a quarter licensed since June 2026.