SCB Goes Live as First Respondent Bank on Citi's Tokenised Deposit Clearing Network

Citi and Siam Commercial Bank (SCB) have confirmed that SCB is the first financial institution to go live on Citi’s combined 24/7 USD Clearing and Citi Token Services platform, which integrates a tokenised deposit layer with an interbank clearing network. The arrangement allows respondent banks such as SCB to settle USD payments outside the operating hours of Fedwire and the Clearing House Interbank Payments System (CHIPS), using book transfers across USD accounts held with Citi in the United States.

The first live transaction illustrates the practical gap the system fills: Phillip Securities Thailand received a dollar payment sent from a Citi London account belonging to affiliate Phillip Capital Inc over a US public holiday weekend, a window in which conventional US payment rails were unavailable. Citi had originally combined the two components in September of the prior year; before that integration, Citi Token Services supported around-the-clock cross-border transfers only between Citi’s own accounts rather than extending to respondent bank clients.

The two components address distinct constraints. The 24/7 USD Clearing leg handles interbank settlement as book entries on Citi-held accounts, bypassing the time restrictions of US core infrastructure. Citi Token Services, running on a private permissioned blockchain, tokenises corporate client deposits so that funds held at Citi branches in other locations can be mobilised into the clearing leg at any hour. Together, they extend always-on dollar liquidity to a respondent bank’s own corporate clients, not merely to intra-Citi flows. The SCB go-live signals that the network is moving from internal capability to external commercial deployment, with other respondent banks a logical next watch point.