Standard Chartered said on November 2 that it has launched its Tokenised Deposits solution for corporate clients in Hong Kong, the first market in the group to offer it. The bank plans to expand the product to more markets over time. It is aimed at corporate treasurers, banks, investment platforms and digital asset businesses that want to run treasury and liquidity operations around the clock.
The solution runs on Standard Chartered's own blockchain infrastructure and connects to the Hong Kong Monetary Authority's EnsembleTX platform. It was developed with support from the HKMA's Supervisory Incubator for Distributed Ledger Technology. The bank says tokenised deposits can be transferred in real time across participating banks, with interbank settlement in central bank money, including wholesale central bank digital currency, on a 24/7 basis. It adds that settling in central bank money reduces counterparty risk as value moves between institutions.
China AMC, Finloop and PantherTrade are already executing live tokenised deposit transactions and settling tokenised money market funds through EnsembleTX, according to the bank. Standard Chartered is also working with Fireblocks to embed banking capabilities in the platform and give it native access to digital asset clients, and HashKey has joined the ecosystem. The announcement gives no transaction volumes, fees, client numbers or timetable for other markets, and it does not name the blockchain.
Mary Huen, who leads the bank's Hong Kong, Greater China and North Asia business, called the launch "the first in our global network." Ole Matthiessen, the bank's global head of transaction services and digital assets, said the aim is to move tokenisation "from experimentation towards broader scalable adoption."
The launch came on the opening day of Hong Kong FinTech Week, where the HKMA said it had advanced EnsembleTX to a stage that supports 24/7 real-value transactions. The pilot now has 12 banks, including HSBC, Standard Chartered Hong Kong, Bank of China (Hong Kong), China Construction Bank (Asia) and ICBC (Asia), with Ant International, BlackRock and China Asset Management (Hong Kong) among its pioneers, according to Unchained. HKMA chief Eddie Yue said the work is moving from piloting toward commercialising tokenisation applications. Financial Secretary Paul Chan said banks will also be able to use tokenised deposits for cross-border payments, and that the HKMA is testing tokenised Exchange Fund Bills.
Blockhead reported on EnsembleTX's start, when the HKMA launched the real-value pilot with seven banks in November 2025. At that stage, interbank settlement ran on Hong Kong's existing real-time gross settlement system for Hong Kong dollars, and the HKMA said it would gradually allow tokenised deposits to settle 24/7. This week's update delivers that step.
The timing links to a regulatory change a week earlier. On October 26, the SFC approved round-the-clock secondary trading of two ChinaAMC tokenised money market funds on PantherTrade, the licensed platform owned by Futu. The SFC said tokenised public funds could eventually use tokenised deposit capabilities developed with the HKMA, so investors could sell tokenised holdings and move the proceeds immediately. Ledger Insights reported that the funds hold about $660 million and that trading runs in a closed loop, with ownership staying on the fund's off-chain register. It also reported that ChinaAMC began using HSBC's tokenised deposit capabilities for the fund's underlying deposits in September, which puts HSBC and Standard Chartered on the same infrastructure in a different role.
Blockhead covered the SFC's framework when FORMS HK, Chainlink and partners launched a shared standard for tokenised securities , noting the SFC's April circular on 24-hour trading and settlement using tokenised deposits and stablecoins. In March, SFC chief Julia Leung argued that banks and asset managers must adopt tokenisation to meet 24/7 demand.
Standard Chartered has described a tokenised deposit product before. Blockhead reported in December that the bank launched a tokenised deposit solution with Ant International as its first client , supporting SGD and USD in Singapore, with HKD, CNH and USD capabilities in Hong Kong. The November 2 announcement says Hong Kong is the first market in the group to offer the solution to corporate clients, and it does not say how the two launches relate. The bank may be distinguishing a single-client deployment from a general corporate offering on EnsembleTX, but the release does not explain it.
The bank's other Hong Kong bets sit alongside the deposits. Anchorpoint, the joint venture with HKT and Animoca Brands, began phase-one beta access for its HKD stablecoin in August, after Blockhead argued in April that Hong Kong's licensed stablecoins would be whitelisted and tightly controlled . A tokenised deposit is the literal version of that thesis: a commercial bank deposit on a ledger, settled by the central bank.
The tokenised fund that Standard Chartered helped launch in 2025 also connects to this week's news. Blockhead reported at the time that Standard Chartered was supporting ChinaAMC's tokenised retail money market fund , built on the Libeara platform that SC Ventures incubated.
The details that will show whether this is a commercial product are volumes, fees, the number of corporate clients and which banks accept each other's tokens on EnsembleTX. HKMA plans to run trials of regulated stablecoins next on the same platform, and Standard Chartered has not said which market follows Hong Kong.