HONG KONG -- Ant International announced its collaboration with HSBC on the bank’s new Tokenised Deposit Service in Hong Kong. The service will support treasury management with real-time, always-on HKD and USD payments between corporate wallets held by a corporate client at HSBC Hong Kong. The Tokenised Deposit Service is also the first bank-led, blockchain-based settlement service in Hong Kong. The launch comes after a successful pilot test between HSBC and Ant International on Ant’s Whale platform, which has been rolling out blockchain-based payments and tokenised deposits solutions with various bank partners.

Following the pilot test, HSBC adapted the learnings from the joint innovation into its Tokenised Deposit Service, with Ant International as the pioneer client. As the first client to utilise the Tokenised Deposit Service, Ant International has successfully completed an instant intra-group fund transfer via the service. It initiated the transaction via its internal global treasury management platform, the Whale platform, digitising its USD deposits with HSBC into digital tokens on the bank’s secure distributed ledger.

One of the core products developed by the Platform Tech team under Ant International’s Embedded Finance business, the Whale platform is a next-generation treasury management solution that utilises blockchain technology, including advanced encryption and AI, to improve the efficiency and transparency of funds transfer between Ant International’s intragroup entities for real-time global treasury management. In 2024, more than a third of Ant International’s transactions were processed on-chain via the Whale platform.

The Whale platform currently supports multiple tokenised assets from leading banks and institutions around the world, enabling interoperability across diverse blockchain networks. By leveraging leading DLT technologies such as homomorphic encryption and zero-knowledge proofs, the Whale platform encrypts transaction information and enables multi-party verification in an encrypted state, ensuring secure, confidential, and seamless cross-chain transactions.

Ant International’s collaboration with HSBC on tokenised deposits expands a longstanding partnership since 2020. In October 2024, Ant International and HSBC also completed a successful HKD-denominated cross-bank experiment under the Hong Kong Monetary Authority’s Ensemble Sandbox.

“We are very excited to work with an industry leader like HSBC, who shares the belief that tokenisation is the key to bridging the stability of traditional banking with the efficiency of blockchain, to enable real-time treasury management,“ said Kelvin Li, General Manager of Platform Tech at Ant International. ”As a tech connector in the fast-evolving financial services industry, our banking partnerships are expanding from tokenisation to AI-driven global FX and liquidity initiatives. We look forward to working with more public and private-sector partners to unlock more transparent, accessible and efficient treasury management solutions for businesses worldwide.”