Tokenised Deposit Consortia Pick Up Pace as GBTD and CBMT Near Live Transactions

At the ECB Forum earlier this month, BIS General Manager Pablo Hernández de Cos posed a pointed question to Bank of Korea Governor Hyun Song Shin: why are tokenised deposits not advancing more quickly? The exchange drew on the BIS’s experience with Project Agorá and Korea’s Project Hangang, but the gap between ambition and production is narrower than the question implies, at least for two major European multibank initiatives.

The UK’s Great British Tokenised Deposits project, coordinated by UK Finance, has completed the build of its orchestration layer with technology partner Quant. Seven banks and building societies, including Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds, Monzo, Nationwide, NatWest and Santander, are shortly set to begin live transactions running into Q4, after which participants will assess the path to full production. The project covers three use cases: a person-to-person marketplace purchase, a mortgage journey and wholesale digital bond settlement. Its architecture provides a clearing and orchestration layer that makes different banks’ tokenised deposits interoperable while preserving existing KYC, AML and deposit protections.

Germany’s Commercial Bank Money Token initiative, which carries European ambitions, executed its first live multibank transactions in May, with Siemens and Evonik transacting across DZ Bank and Commerzbank. CBMT’s model places deposit tokens directly onto third-party industry blockchains where corporates run their business processes. BaFin classified CBMT as a deposit in December 2025, and the project targets five banks at launch supporting EUR, USD and JPY, with Commerzbank, Deutsche Bank, DZ Bank and UniCredit among the participants. Both initiatives identified coordination as their primary challenge, a familiar constraint for consortium structures operating across competing institutions.