SINGAPORE — Global adoption of tokenized money is moving faster than expected among businesses looking to improve liquidity management and access new markets, a top executive from Singapore bank DBS said.
The remarks by Lim Soon Chong, the group head of global transaction services, follow a survey by the lender that showed that 88 percent of businesses have deployed or are piloting tokenized money use cases.
Conducted between June and July, the survey polled 422 global business and finance leaders from organizations with annual revenue exceeding $500 million across 11 markets, including the US, UK, Australia, China and Germany.
Roughly two-thirds of respondents said their businesses had either fully deployed tokenized money at scale or begun using it in selected locations.
Stablecoins were the most widely adopted tokenized instrument at 63 percent, followed by tokenized deposits at 53 percent and tokenized money market funds at 52 percent.
“Our interpretation is that there are significant benefits that stablecoins offer,” said Lim.
“Stablecoins, as you know, offer better fungibility across payment intermediaries, not just across banks. They are less cumbersome from a permissioning standpoint,” he said.
The survey found Southeast Asia was the top destination for businesses looking to expand into new markets, followed by Australia and New Zealand, with India ranking third.
More than half of respondents in both Australia and the UK said they were considering using the Chinese renminbi for trade settlement over the next one to two years.
The renminbi’s recent appreciation is making renminbi settlement more attractive to Chinese exporters, who are increasingly offering better commercial terms for transactions denominated in the currency, DBS said.
“The Chinese authorities are clearly pushing the internationalization of the renminbi, so we expect this to go up,” Lim said.
