DBS and Citi settle weekend dollar payment on Swift ledger
DBS Singapore and Citi New York settled tokenized deposits in minutes on Sept. 5. No amount, client, or production timeline was disclosed.
DBS and Citi executed a U.S. dollar payment on Saturday, September 5, between DBS in Singapore and Citi's New York office.
The transfer ran on Swift's Digital Ledger using tokenized deposits — bank money represented as digital tokens on a shared record.
The banks said it settled in minutes. The same corridor can take one to two business days on conventional correspondent rails, which typically sit idle over a weekend.
DBS, Citi, and Swift are the named operators. Any treasurer who cannot wait for Monday dollar clearing is the user this test is meant to reach.
Singapore to New York, after the cutoff
The two offices in the announcement are DBS in Singapore and Citi in New York.
That pairing sits across the weekend gap in U.S. dollar clearing, which still concentrates in New York banking hours.
The banks described the result in a Monday announcement after the Saturday execution.
A second live payment, not a public coin
Swift launched the Digital Ledger in July with 17 banks across six continents, as a bridge between existing bank systems and always-on digital payment networks.
The DBS-Citi transfer is the second confirmed live payment on that ledger.
HSBC and Standard Chartered completed the first in August, as Swift tests whether its infrastructure can keep running through weekends and holidays.
This was a tokenized-deposit movement between banks, not a retail stablecoin and not a change in who holds the customer deposit.
Chew, the survey, and Asia's payment scale
Rachel Chew, DBS group chief operating officer and co-head of digital assets, said: "In a global digital economy that never sleeps, businesses need to move money more quickly and efficiently across borders to stay competitive."
DBS said 50 percent of finance leaders it surveyed are exploring blockchain-based tools for liquidity and foreign-exchange management.
The bank cited Money20/20 and FXC Intelligence figures that Asia's outbound cross-border payments are expected to reach $24 trillion by 2033, up from $13.5 trillion in 2025.
Those figures are the backdrop DBS attached to the test. They are not a measure of the September 5 payment.
What remains unknown
The banks did not disclose the payment amount, the client, or a timeline for offering weekend tokenized-deposit transfers as a production service.
It is not known whether September 5 was an internal bank-to-bank trial or a customer instruction.
Swift has not said how many of the 17 launch banks have now completed a live payment, or what operational controls apply when the traditional correspondent cutoff has passed.
Whether minutes-scale settlement becomes a standing Singapore–New York weekend corridor is still open.