Canada's Six Largest Banks Unite on Tokenised Deposit Initiative
Key points
- BMO, CIBC, NBC, RBC, Scotiabank, and TD Bank Group jointly announced a Canadian-dollar tokenised deposit initiative on 22 September 2026.
- OSFI confirmed the previous week that tokenised deposits are not legally distinct from conventional deposits under Canadian law, reducing regulatory uncertainty for the project.
- Phase one targets inter-institutional movement of tokenised deposits within Canada, with a longer-term goal of connecting to third-party digital asset platforms.
- The multi-bank model contrasts with dominant single-institution approaches taken globally by JPMorgan, Citi, and HSBC, and introduces an unresolved interbank settlement question involving either RTGS rails or a wholesale CBDC layer.
- The Bank of Canada's Project Samara, a wholesale CBDC initiative focused on digital bond settlement, completed earlier in 2026 and provides relevant domestic infrastructure precedent.
Canada’s six largest banks have jointly announced a tokenised deposit initiative covering Canadian dollars, invoking programmability as the primary rationale. The institutions involved are Bank of Montreal (BMO), Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC), National Bank of Canada (NBC), Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), the Bank of Nova Scotia (Scotiabank), and TD Bank Group. The announcement came the same week that Canada’s principal banking regulator, the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions (OSFI), confirmed that tokenised deposits carry no separate legal status from conventional deposits, removing a layer of regulatory ambiguity that had hovered over similar efforts elsewhere.
The initiative is structured in phases. The first targets movement of tokenised deposits across Canadian financial institutions, with a stated longer-term ambition to connect to third-party digital asset ecosystems. The banks noted that other deposit-taking institutions could join at an appropriate point, suggesting the architecture is being designed with broader participation in mind rather than a closed six-bank club.
The multi-bank structure sets this effort apart from the dominant pattern in tokenised deposits globally, where single institutions such as JPMorgan, Citi, and HSBC have pursued proprietary solutions precisely because they sidestep the interbank settlement complexity. Moving value between banks requires both a token transfer on the customer side and a separate interbank settlement leg, which can run through a conventional real-time gross settlement (RTGS) system or through a wholesale central bank digital currency (CBDC) or tokenised reserves. Earlier this year the Bank of Canada completed Project Samara, a wholesale CBDC project oriented around digital bond settlement, giving the Canadian market a reference point for that second leg. Whether the new initiative will lean on a similar mechanism or route interbank flows through conventional rails remains an open question at this stage.
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