DBS Survey: 88% of Large Firms Are Live or Piloting Tokenised Money

A DBS-commissioned EY survey of 422 large-company finance and business leaders across 11 markets finds that 88% of respondents are either running live deployments or pilots of tokenised money, with 24% having already scaled the technology and 43% using it in selected markets. The study covered organisations with annual revenue above $500 million in markets including the United States, China, Germany, and the United Kingdom.

Stablecoins are the most widely used or planned instrument at 63%, ahead of tokenised deposits at 53% and tokenised money market funds at 52%. Faster cross-border settlement and improved treasury liquidity management ranked as the leading expected benefits, cited by 71% and 65% of respondents respectively, while 72% see better traceability coming within two years. Regulatory uncertainty, security risks, and integration complexity remain the main barriers, with nearly two-thirds of respondents wanting banks to serve as a single access point into the tokenised money ecosystem.

DBS sits on both sides of this picture: as survey sponsor and as an infrastructure provider. The bank launched DBS Token Services in 2024, linking its permissioned blockchain to its payment systems for round-the-clock settlement. In September, DBS and Citi completed a cross-border dollar payment between Singapore and New York via the Swift Digital Ledger using tokenised deposits, settling in minutes outside traditional banking hours. Citi, for its part, reported at its May investor day that hundreds of clients were moving close to $1 billion daily through Citi Token Services for liquidity and working capital management.

The survey positions DBS in a market it is actively building, so the enthusiasm of the findings warrants that context. Still, the sheer scale of reported adoption across 422 large organisations suggests that tokenised cash is moving from proof-of-concept into operational treasury infrastructure faster than many observers expected, with bank-orchestrated multi-network interoperability emerging as the competitive battleground.