Tokenised deposits: the future of money, or just a transitional fix?

The financial system has long been predicated on trust, but that trust has often come at the cost of speed, efficiency and transparency. Tokenised deposits (digital representations of bank deposits recorded on a blockchain) represent a powerful intersection of tradition and innovation, retaining the stability of traditional banking whilst embracing the capabilities of distributed ledger technology (DLT). Could this mean then that, as the financial sector undergoes a significant transformation, tokenised deposits become the catalyst that finally brings payments into the modern era? Around the world, banks annually spend billions maintaining legacy systems that are slow, opaque and expensive. In 2023 alone, financial institutions spent over $205 billion on financial crime compliance: $65 billion in North America, $15 billion in South America, $85 billion in EMEA and $45 billion in APAC. Tokenised deposits hold the potential to streamline compliance costs and settlement times by embeddin…