Canada’s six biggest banks are testing tokenized deposits for bank-to-bank payments

Canada’s six largest banks are working together on a tokenized deposit initiative aimed at moving Canadian-dollar deposits between financial institutions, according to a joint press release from National Bank of Canada. The project brings together Royal Bank of Canada, Toronto-Dominion Bank, Bank of Nova Scotia, Bank of Montreal, Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce and National Bank of Canada.

The banks said the first phase will focus on transferring tokenized deposits denominated in Canadian dollars between financial institutions. In practical terms, tokenized deposits are digital representations of bank deposits that can be recorded and moved on a shared ledger.

Coverage from The Globe and Mail said the lenders are developing the system as part of a broader effort to keep pace with digital-money developments. BNN Bloomberg reported that the structure could allow the banks to share the same blockchain, with transactions moving more quickly across wallets, although the bank release itself did not use that wording.

A shared payments experiment among the country’s largest lenders

The joint release framed the work as an exploration of tokenized deposits rather than a completed rollout. It did not provide a launch date, and it did not spell out which institutions or customers would use the system first outside the initial interbank phase.

The Globe and Mail reported that the lenders’ longer-term goal is to connect with other emerging digital asset initiatives, but the banks did not specify which projects those might be. The same report said some of the banks declined to comment further on the initiative.

If the project advances, it would represent a notable step in how major Canadian lenders test blockchain-based payment infrastructure for conventional bank money, even as key operational details remain to be defined.