Standard Chartered: Stablecoins Could Complete Tokenisation's Missing Cash Leg

Standard Chartered‘s head of Digital Assets, Financing and Securities Services, Waqar Chaudry, argues that the first phase of tokenisation demonstrated digital issuance and transfer, but left a structural gap: the money leg still runs on conventional timetables, banking windows and reconciliation queues. Stablecoins, on this reading, matter not because they move value faster in isolation, but because they can make cash available on the same networks and within the same workflows as the investment asset itself, enabling coordinated delivery-versus-payment rather than a sequence of disconnected confirmations.

Chaudry is careful to scope what “24/7” actually means in institutional markets. Continuous order submission, settlement, secondary trading, fund subscriptions and redemptions, and fiat conversion are distinct capabilities that will develop at different speeds. A credible market model, he argues, must specify which service is continuously available, at what price, with what liquidity and under which legal controls, rather than treating round-the-clock access as a single switch to flip.

Tokenised funds receive particular attention as an early use case. In a stablecoin-enabled workflow, eligible investors could move through funding, unit issuance, custody and record-keeping as one controlled digital process, with redemption reversing those steps and proceeds delivered in an accepted form of digital money. The piece stops well short of claiming stablecoins will displace commercial bank money or central bank money; the likelier outcome it describes is a multi-money environment in which different regulated digital money forms serve different networks and risk requirements, with trusted conversion between them. Liquidity, pricing, investor protection and legal settlement finality are all flagged as needing to develop alongside the technology, which keeps this firmly in the domain of strategic positioning rather than an announcement of any live product or infrastructure.