Ant International sweeps idle treasury cash into Franklin Templeton tokenised MMF via HSBC

Ant International has executed a corporate treasury sweep using HSBC‘s tokenised deposits as the settlement rail, routing surplus cash into Franklin Templeton‘s Benji tokenised money market fund (MMF). The transaction was orchestrated through WhaleRTP, Ant’s blockchain-based treasury platform, and surfaced via LinkedIn posts rather than a formal press announcement. HSBC characterised it as a first transaction, placing the arrangement firmly in pilot territory.

The operational logic is straightforward: conventional MMFs impose early-afternoon dealing cut-offs and at best same-day settlement, which forces treasurers to leave cash idle in bank accounts overnight to preserve liquidity buffers. Ant, which manages funds across 17 currencies around the clock, accumulates precisely those idle balances across time zones. A tokenised subscription and redemption mechanism that operates at any hour allows surplus cash to earn a fund yield right up to the moment it is needed, with the tokenised deposit providing an instant on-ramp and off-ramp.

This is the second such arrangement Ant has executed in four months. In June, Ant began using digital share classes of an Amundi MMF issued on Ethereum, a structure contained within the Credit Agricole group, which owns Amundi and whose CACEIS arm handles tokenisation. The HSBC-Franklin Templeton structure has no equivalent vertical integration: HSBC’s tokenised deposits run on a permissioned ledger, Benji issues fund tokens on public blockchains, and WhaleRTP, which already connects to more than 20 banks, appears to serve as the orchestration layer bridging the two. Whether this multi-rail, multi-party architecture can be industrialised beyond a first transaction is the question operators in this space will now be watching.