Ant International has partnered with HSBC to launch the first bank-led, blockchain-based tokenised deposit settlement service in Hong Kong, marking a significant milestone in digital treasury innovation.
The collaboration enables real-time HKD and USD fund transfers between corporate wallets held within HSBC Hong Kong, offering an “always-on” payment capability for corporate clients.
The new service follows a successful pilot between the two firms conducted on Ant International’s Whale platform, a proprietary blockchain-based treasury management system developed under its Embedded Finance business.
Ant International became the first corporate client to execute an instant intra-group fund transfer through HSBC’s Tokenised Deposit Service, converting USD deposits into digital tokens and settling the transaction via HSBC’s secure distributed ledger.
The Whale platform, which processed over one-third of Ant International’s transactions on-chain in 2024, is designed to enhance global treasury operations using distributed ledger technology (DLT), homomorphic encryption, and zero-knowledge proofs.
It allows encrypted transaction data to be verified across multiple parties while preserving confidentiality and ensuring interoperability across diverse blockchain networks.
HSBC incorporated insights from the pilot into its service design, with Ant International acting as a pioneer client.
The solution reflects both firms’ broader strategy of integrating traditional financial infrastructure with blockchain to improve efficiency and transparency in fund movements.
The partnership extends a multi-year relationship between HSBC and Ant International, which includes joint digital finance experiments under the Hong Kong Monetary Authority’s Ensemble Sandbox.
The collaboration is part of a growing trend where major financial institutions are leveraging tokenisation and blockchain technologies to modernize corporate finance and cross-border liquidity management.
Business News Asia