Move treasury liquidity instantly across borders
Tokenized deposits, much like stablecoins, can help corporate treasury teams meaningfully improve liquidity management across banks, currencies, and regions by enabling near-instant movement of funds and real-time visibility into cash positions. As corporate treasury moves onchain, tokenized deposits represent a major opportunity for financial institutions to capture new market share.
The challenge with traditional treasury management
Operating across multiple geographies requires companies to maintain relationships with multiple banks, manage balances in several currencies, and navigate an array of local settlement systems, cutoff times, and time zones. For global treasury teams, this results in a fragmented operational landscape with inconsistent processes across regions.
Moving liquidity between a company's own accounts can take days and require subsidiaries to hold excess cash "just in case." Visibility into cash positions is incomplete, workflows vary by region, and reconciling activity across dozens of accounts becomes an ongoing operational burden. The result is inefficient use of capital and a patchwork of manual processes for controls and compliance.
How tokenized deposits and stablecoins solve this
Tokenized deposits and stablecoins offer a path toward simplifying this complexity. Instead of managing dozens of accounts across multiple banks, companies can operate a single wallet per subsidiary. Sitting alongside traditional bank accounts, these digital wallets become a natural extension of corporate treasury operations and provide a more efficient way to manage global liquidity.
Each wallet can hold stablecoins, tokenized deposits, and even tokenized money market funds on the same unified onchain infrastructure. Tokenized deposits and stablecoins introduce a shared set of benefits that transform how corporates store, move, and deploy liquidity:
- Liquidity can be moved 24/7, across time zones, and across borders, removing the delays of local settlement systems and cutoff times;
- Reconciliation becomes simpler through onchain settlement records instead of disparate bank statements and siloed reporting systems;
- Idle balances can be deployed more efficiently, improving working-capital usage and enabling immediate access to interest-bearing tokenized assets;
- Treasury workflows such as approvals, sweeps, and controls can be automated with smart contracts, reducing manual processes and operational overhead.
Understanding tokenized deposits vs. stablecoins
As digital wallets become integrated into corporate treasury operations, it is important to understand how stablecoins and tokenized deposits differ. They are distinct instruments with different issuers, obligations, and regulatory treatment:
- Tokenized deposits are commercial bank deposits issued on a blockchain. They remain a liability of the issuing bank and sit within the existing banking regulatory framework, behaving much like traditional deposits, but with the added benefits of programmability and real-time settlement.
- Stablecoins, by contrast, are issued by regulated non-bank stablecoin providers and backed 1:1 with reserves such as cash and short-term government securities. They are designed to maintain a stable value relative to currencies like the U.S. dollar or Euro and can move across blockchains unaffected by cutoff times, banking hours, or regional settlement windows.
The opportunity for financial institutions
For financial institutions, tokenized deposits represent a major opportunity to strengthen existing corporate relationships and win market share as treasury infrastructure moves onchain. Large enterprises are already adopting stablecoins because they provide the speed, global reach, and programmability that traditional banking infrastructure cannot match.
Tokenized deposits give financial institutions a way to offer many of these same benefits while maintaining the trust and regulatory certainty that corporates rely on. Tokenized deposits are also far more familiar to large corporations: they behave like traditional deposits, remain a liability of the issuing bank, and fit naturally into existing accounting and compliance models.
The main challenge for banks today is interoperability. Most tokenized deposit pilots run inside the closed perimeter of a single institution, limiting their usefulness in multi-bank, multi-region treasury setups. Corporations will only adopt tokenized deposits at scale if they can move funds seamlessly across banks and easily convert between tokenized deposits, stablecoins, and other tokenized assets.
Public blockchains provide this missing bridge. They allow tokenized deposits from different banks to coexist on shared infrastructure, enabling frictionless swaps between tokenized deposits and stablecoins, and supporting cross-bank liquidity movement with the same speed as stablecoin rails. Banks that issue tokenized deposits on public chains gain the interoperability corporates require, while strengthening their role at the center of onchain financial flows.
Building with Tempo
Tempo provides the neutral, high-performance infrastructure required for tokenized deposits and stablecoins to operate side-by-side. For treasury teams looking to modernize their liquidity stack, the challenge is often interoperability between these assets and existing banking systems. We collaborate with financial institutions and enterprises to model how these assets can coexist within your current treasury operations. Let's examine how onchain rails can fit into your broader liquidity management strategy.