On Securitize’s webpage for BlackRock’s BUIDL fund, the working week reappears halfway down the screen. One section offers transfers of tokenised fund shares around the clock. Another offers conversion into US dollars every business day. A little further down, the redemption deadline explains which clock the dollars follow.
Both features can be useful. They solve different problems. A CFO funding payroll needs money in a particular bank account by a particular time. A CFO moving an investment as collateral may need the fund share itself. A token crossing a screen makes an excellent demonstration. It leaves rather a lot of the business case off-screen.
Imagine a treasurer on Sunday evening moving $2 million of investment tokens between two company wallets. This is a thought experiment, with no client behind it. The transfer succeeds immediately. Her Monday payroll account is unchanged. She has demonstrated transferability. Funding payroll still requires a redemption or a buyer, followed by a payment route that gets the proceeds to her bank in time.
That buyer could exist. Securitize allows BUIDL transfers between approved investors and describes third-party liquidity routes, while warning that their availability is not guaranteed. Its own dollar-redemption process runs through a business-day window. That gap stays open even when every piece of the technology works perfectly.
In treasury, tokenisation means recording a financial claim on a programmable platform, often a blockchain. The claim might be a bond, a fund share or a bank deposit. Software can attach conditions to transfers. In a bond purchase, the security and the payment can move on an all-or-none basis: both legs settle, or neither does. This is called atomic settlement. Delivery against payment already exists in finance; programmable platforms can extend the coordination to more complicated, linked transactions.
A corporate treasurer has good reasons to be interested. In September 2024, Siemens issued a €300 million, one-year digital bond. The company says it settled automatically within minutes in central bank money, using SWIAT’s permissioned blockchain and the Bundesbank’s Trigger Solution. Its earlier digital bond had needed two days to settle. Those are settlement times. The release gives us no cheaper coupon or smaller total bill.
Nobody was disintermediated, either. DekaBank registered the bond. Deutsche Bank handled settlement for Siemens. Five banks invested. The achievement was less exotic and more useful: a group of institutions finishing one transaction without the usual wait for the other side.
There are tentative signs of a financing benefit too. ECB researchers reported in April that tokenised bonds had issuance yield spreads averaging 14 basis points, or 0.14 percentage points, below matched conventional bonds. Their yield comparison included 23 tokenised bonds and 49 conventional ones. That is an encouraging association in a small, predominantly European market. Matching similar bonds cannot remove every difference between the issuers and investors who choose an experiment like this.
The same study found no clear reduction in underwriting fees, its proxy for operational costs. A separate analysis found narrower bid-ask spreads, suggesting better market liquidity. Fair enough. None of it puts a guaranteed saving into the next company’s financing budget. Moving a bond faster and financing a company more cheaply remain different achievements.
Europe’s institutional foundation has improved since Siemens’ transaction. The Eurosystem launched Pontes on 21 September this year, connecting market distributed-ledger platforms to TARGET Services so wholesale tokenised transactions can settle in central bank money. Six weeks later, the European Stability Mechanism settled a €1 billion digital-native bond through it, the first supranational issuer to do so. Participant eligibility requires access to T2, so an ordinary company generally encounters this through its banks. Safe settlement of the cash leg leaves the bond issuer’s ability to repay as a separate risk.
As of its 5 November update, the ECB was working towards round-the-clock Pontes availability in 2028. The retail digital euro is a separate project for everyday payments, with readiness for potential issuance in 2029 conditional on legislation. Nobody needs to wait for it to make a tokenisation decision now. They do need to price in today’s opening hours.
There is a duller alternative, and it deserves a hearing: fix the payment route you already have. In the same November speech, the ECB describes TIPS, its instant payment settlement service, as already settling payments in central bank money around the clock. A faster bank payment may solve a company’s immediate problem without moving an investment onto a new ledger. That comparison gives tokenisation a useful hurdle. Its extra work has to buy something beyond a quick transfer, such as linking the payment to the asset’s delivery. The ordinary plumbing is allowed to win.
The claim behind the token deserves at least as much attention as the transfer. A fund share is an investment in a fund. A tokenised deposit, in the narrow sense described by the European Banking Authority, records a depositor’s claim against a bank. Central bank money has the central bank behind it. These can look remarkably similar on a dashboard. Their risks and uses differ considerably.
MiCA, the EU’s Markets in Crypto-assets Regulation, excludes financial instruments and deposits from its scope. Tokenised securities remain subject to securities law. E-money tokens referencing a single official currency sit within MiCA, with their own issuer and redemption rules. The DLT Pilot Regime provides a framework for authorised trading and settlement infrastructures handling financial instruments. An EU regulatory label needs to be attached to the correct claim. In September, the EBA was still calling for clearer classification. Even Brussels is reading the small print.
BUIDL, for example, seeks a stable $1 share value and expressly says it cannot guarantee it. Its government-security investments do not turn the fund share into a guaranteed bank balance. Nor does this US product’s existence establish that a particular European company can buy it. The eligibility and investment policy of the company remain part of the decision.
For a business whose lender accepts a tokenised fund share as collateral, moving it around the clock could be valuable. An investment might support an obligation without first being sold, where the agreements and systems permit it. The same share can fit that task while adding an unnecessary conversion step to payroll funding. Tokenisation can earn its place by enabling a useful transaction, even when the destination is another investment account.
Speed can also bring the cash bill forward. The BIS and its payments committee warn that instant gross settlement can need more prefunding than arrangements which net obligations. Take a deliberately tiny hypothetical: two parties owe each other €10 million and €9 million, in the same currency at the same time. With legally enforceable netting, the difference to pay is €1 million. A design requiring both gross amounts to be funded immediately creates a different cash demand.
That arithmetic describes a trade-off, without modelling any named platform. Faster reuse of money and assets can offset prefunding needs, as the BIS also recognises. The outcome depends on the settlement design and the sequence of obligations. A CFO can celebrate lower settlement exposure and still receive a larger intraday funding request.
At the supply-chain boundary, the same care applies to what triggers a payment. Imagine a contract releasing funds when a warehouse records a delivery. The code can respond perfectly to a wrong record. Someone still needs to establish what arrived and handle the dispute. The ledger cannot climb inside the container.
My view is that the exception deserves a place beside the successful demonstration. A mistaken payment, an unavailable operator or a disputed instruction brings the contract back into the room. The company needs someone with authority to resolve the problem, and a usable record of what happened. An elegant transfer mechanism can coexist with an awkward recovery process. Where the new arrangement adds a custodian or a separate platform, that dependency belongs in the price of the transaction as well. Automation leaves the cost of an argument somewhere.
An analyst who previously matched three records could gain time if everyone uses the same authoritative one. If the platform instead leaves her with a fourth record to reconcile, the company has bought another bill and kept the old work. Integration into the treasury system matters. So does the network of counterparties willing to use it. The ECB itself warns that tokenisation could create closed networks and fragmented liquidity.
The case for a faster bond settlement can be excellent. It belongs beside an equally exact account of where the cash goes. Our Sunday treasurer can appreciate both. In one window, the token transfer has turned green. Beside it, the payroll account still shows the old balance. On Monday she will answer for the second window.
David