Mashreq and Citi Run Cross-Border Payment Test on Swift Ledger
Mashreq settled a transaction with Citi using bank-issued tokenised deposits on a Swift ledger built to move money around the clock.
Nadia Mansour Nadia Mansour covers fintech across the UAE and MENA for Anecdoted -- digital banking, payments licences and the startups building around them. nadia@anecdoted.com
Mashreq has completed a cross-border payment with Citi over Swift’s blockchain ledger, settling the transaction with tokenised deposits issued by a bank. The deal forms part of a Swift programme examining whether international payments can move faster than correspondent banking chains allow.
The arrangement connects those deposits to Swift’s messaging network. Mashreq says the pairing can take friction out of cross-border payments, and it points to three areas where it expects improvement:
- Payment speed.
- Liquidity efficiency.
- The movement of funds between markets.
Liquidity efficiency carries weight for transaction banks. Balances prefunded to cover cross-border flows sit idle for stretches of the day, and settlement that runs continuously can shorten those stretches.
A shared layer for deposit claims
More than 40 financial institutions took part in designing the ledger. Swift said in July 2026 that it was open for use, and 17 banks have been piloting tokenised deposit transactions on it since.
In its minimum viable product stage, the ledger is meant to demonstrate that cross-border payments can settle in real time, at any hour and on any day. It works as a shared layer connecting tokenised deposits held at the participating institutions.
Swift’s messaging network carries payment instructions between banks. The ledger sits alongside it, holding deposit claims that participants can transfer between one another.
“As businesses increasingly operate in a digital, always-on economy, the demand for real-time movement of liquidity continues to grow,” said Vivek Batra, Head of Global Transaction Banking at Mashreq.
“This milestone reflects Citi Services’ strategy to connect traditional payments infrastructure with next-generation digital asset networks, helping deliver 24/7 payment availability and more efficient liquidity mobility for clients,” said Rizwan Shaikh, Head of Services for Middle East and Africa at Citi.
Deposits that stay on the bank’s books
Tokenised deposits have drawn growing interest from banks in part because they are not public digital assets. They remain regulated liabilities of the issuing bank, and they are built to operate inside existing banking, compliance and settlement frameworks.
The pilot group is transacting with deposit-backed value rather than public crypto assets.
Cross-border payments have historically been bound to the working hours of the currencies and clearing systems involved. A payment sent late in one market can sit until the next business day somewhere else, and each intermediary along the route adds a step. The MVP phase is built to test whether settlement can run without that calendar.
For Mashreq, the transaction extends work it has already been doing on digital assets and emerging payment technologies.
Seventeen banks remain in the pilot. Whether the ledger can carry round-the-clock cross-border settlement in practice is what the minimum viable product stage is still working out.
