Asset tokenization has real potential to transform issuance settlement.
Swift’s panel, moderated by Nick Kerrigan, head of innovation execution at SWIFT, on how Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) could be used for international payments generated a lot of interest today, with people sitting on the floor and peering through the window in the hope of hearing more about one of the hottest topic at this year’s Sibos.
Last week, Swift, in collaboration with Capgemini, proved that CBDCs and tokenized assets can integrate to existing payments systems and Kerrigan reveals that Swift has 15 central and commercial banks experimenting in its CBDC sandbox.
There are currently 105 central banks actively exploring digital currencies and Kerrigan believes there will be many different use cases and many different business types and technologies and therefore interoperability will become crucial.
“Our view is that we should be thinking about interoperability now at this relatively early stage of development to CBDCs – so we’re encouraging the community to think about that early on,” states Kerrigan. “What we’ve designed is a solution that can link CBDC networks with existing payment systems as well as different CBCDs to enable cross-border payments from them.”
In another collaborative partnership—with Citi, Clearstream, Northern Trust and SETL—Swift has been helping to assess the potential of the tokenized asset market to create tokens, burn tokens and to do delivery versus payment transactions across different platforms and across different cash length times.
Asset tokenization has real potential to transform issuance settlement. “I think that there is real and growing demand for new asset types that are digital, ” explains Jussi Lindberg, chief commercial officer, Digital Assets. “Digital expression of assets—either digitally native or the tokenized version of existing assets—is opening the door to a wider array of investors.”
