Nearly 90% of businesses are turning to tokenised money, DBS survey shows

A DBS survey of 422 business and finance leaders found 88% of businesses had deployed or were piloting tokenised-money use cases, with roughly two-thirds using them at scale or in selected locations. Stablecoins were the most adopted instrument (63%), followed by tokenised deposits (53%) and tokenised money market funds (52%). DBS said Southeast Asia was the leading target for market expansion, while more than half of respondents in Australia and the UK were considering renminbi trade settlement over the next one to two years.

Analysis

The investable signal is a possible shift in corporate treasury plumbing, not evidence yet of a comparable shift in payment revenue: the survey measures reported deployment or pilots, not transaction volumes, balances, or bank economics. Its large-company sample and DBS’s role as the survey sponsor warrant discounting the headline adoption rate.

If tokenised payments scale, infrastructure providers and banks that can connect tokenised assets to existing treasury, compliance, and FX workflows may gain fee opportunities. DBS could be positioned to capture those flows, but adoption is not automatically accretive: stablecoin balances may displace deposits, and cheaper settlement could pressure correspondent-banking fees. The net effect depends on whether new flows and service fees exceed lost balances and pricing pressure. Banks with strong transaction-banking franchises face both sides of that trade; specialist custody, compliance, and interoperability providers are potential indirect beneficiaries.

The RMB angle is conditional, not a one-way currency catalyst. A stronger RMB and improved commercial terms may encourage invoicing in RMB, while exchange-rate risk, hedging costs, and policy constraints can limit actual settlement growth. Over 1–3 months, watch for named corporate or bank launches, regulatory clarity, and disclosed transaction volumes. Over 6–18 months, the key question is whether tokenised rails capture recurring working-capital flows rather than remain pilots. The principal contrarian point: adoption headlines may overstate near-term monetisation, while understating deposit and fee cannibalisation for incumbent banks.

Key Decisions for Investors

• No immediate directional trade from the survey alone. Treat it as a sector watch signal; do not extrapolate reported pilots into near-term revenue estimates.
• Watch DBS’s transaction-banking disclosures for tokenised-payment volumes, fee contribution, and corporate deposit trends. A sustained rise in usage without deposit attrition would strengthen the positive thesis; falling transaction balances or fee pressure would weaken it.
• Prefer a conditional relative-value thesis over an outright bank long: favor banks or infrastructure providers that demonstrate monetised tokenised flows and interoperable treasury services over banks exposed mainly to legacy correspondent-fee economics. Validate with company-level disclosures before positioning.
• Treat RMB-settlement interest as a catalyst to monitor, not a standalone long-RMB trade. Confirm with invoicing and settlement data, hedging costs, and exporter contract terms; rising volatility or policy restrictions would falsify the conversion thesis.