Karsten Wenzlaff, Advisor
August 26th, 2025
Karsten Wenzlaff is a Crowdfunding and Fintech Expert from Germany. He is Secretary-General of Digit[...]
Canada’s Big Six Collaborate on CAD Tokenized Deposits
September 23, 2026 | NCFA Market Activity | Payments Infrastructure And Money Movement, Digital Assets Blockchain And Tokenization, Banking And Credit, Competition And Market Structure
Big Six Partnership For Tokenized Canadian Dollars
On September 22, 2026, BMO, CIBC, National Bank of Canada, RBC, Scotiabank and TD announced that they are jointly exploring CAD tokenized deposits. The first phase aims to transfer tokenized deposits across Canadian financial institutions. Longer term, the banks want to connect the project with other emerging digital asset infrastructure.
It's a partnership at an early stage, but banks have been here before. The banks haven't disclosed a project name, investment amount, technology provider, structure or governance model. They also haven't explained whether each bank would issue its own tokenized liability or exactly what happens when a deposit transfers from one institution to another.
Canada's largest banks compete hard for deposits, payments and corporate clients. They also have a long history of building together when six versions of the same underlying system would cost more and work less effectively.
Four Dates Put The Partnership In Context
March 5, 2026 The Bank of Canada completed Project Samara with Export Development Canada, RBC and TD. EDC issued a C$100 million tokenized bond to a closed investor group and settled the payments in wholesale central bank money. The experiment achieved real time settlement and improved data integrity, but system complexity, liquidity costs and new governance requirements offset some of the efficiency gains.
May 27, 2026 The Bank of Canada joined BIS Project Agorá. Its prototype combines tokenized commercial bank deposits with wholesale central bank money on a programmable platform for wholesale cross border payments.
September 10, 2026 OSFI clarified how Canadian bank regulation treats tokenized deposits. OSFI said the technology used to represent a product doesn't determine its legal nature and that tokenized deposits are not legally distinct from traditional deposits simply because they are represented digitally.
September 22, 2026 All six major Canadian banks announced that they were exploring a Canadian dollar tokenized deposit solution together. That brought the Canadian story from capital markets testing and international experimentation into a domestic partnership between the banks that hold much of the country's commercial deposits.
These projects weren't announced as one coordinated program. Seen together, they show the regulatory, settlement and commercial pieces of tokenized Canadian dollar finance being worked on at roughly the same time.
OSFI's position gives the partnership a clearer legal starting point. Tokenization doesn't automatically turn a bank deposit into a different financial product. Existing legal, technology, cyber and third party risk requirements still apply, and banks are expected to engage their supervisors before launching novel products.
Deposit insurance will depend on the final design, however the Canada Deposit Insurance Corporation says innovative products, including tokenized deposits, may qualify for protection when they meet the legal requirements for an eligible deposit. CDIC assesses them case by case, so the Big Six project can't yet be described as insured.
It is also different from Canada's developing stablecoin market. Canada's federal stablecoin framework applies its new issuer regime to non-financial institutions. Banks and credit unions already operate under prudential regulation.
A qualifying tokenized deposit can preserve a customer's deposit claim on a bank while adding new ways to transfer or settle value digitally. Canada's stablecoin framework, by comparison, requires non-financial issuers to back fiat stablecoins with reserves and provide redemption at par.
See Canada Stablecoin Regulations Guide
It becomes important if tokenized securities, stablecoins and bank deposits eventually need to exchange value on the same financial networks. Canada's banks aren't simply exploring another digital asset. They are exploring what regulated commercial bank money could look like inside those networks.
Canada's Banks Have Shared The Plumbing Before
The idea of competitors cooperating behind the customer layer isn't new in Canadian banking. Payments, identity, cheque processing and compliance have all produced examples where financial institutions shared systems or standards, then kept competing on the services built around them.
| Collaboration | What The Banks Shared | What Happened |
| Interac | Canada's major financial institutions came together in 1984 to create a national shared cash dispensing network. | That network expanded into debit and electronic transfers. In 2025, Interac processed 7 billion debit transactions and 1.6 billion e-Transfers. |
| SecureKey | BMO, CIBC, RBC, Scotiabank, TD and Desjardins backed common digital identity infrastructure. | The institutions invested C$27 million in SecureKey in 2016. Its Canadian verification capabilities later became part of Interac. Interac Verified handled 544 million transactions in 2025. |
| Symcor | BMO, RBC and TD combined cheque processing that had previously been handled separately. | The collaboration consolidated 21 processing sites to seven and put the banks on one technology platform. |
| CanDeal Third Party Risk | All six major banks are working with CanDeal on common third party due diligence and compliance processes. | The banks and CanDeal announced their investment in February 2026. The amount wasn't disclosed and the project is still publicly described as a pilot, so there isn't a verified outcome yet. |
Interac began in 1984 because customers needed access to cash beyond their own bank's machines. Four decades later, the same network supports everyday payments and money transfers at national scale. The banks didn't need six incompatible cash networks to compete for customers.
The identity example required actual shared capital. BMO, CIBC, RBC, Scotiabank, TD and Desjardins put C$27 million into SecureKey in 2016 to commercialize a common digital identity network. Interac later acquired the Canadian rights to SecureKey's digital ID services, including Verified.Me. Interac Vrified processed 544 million transactions in 2025.
Symcor example highlights the cost argument more directly. When BMO, RBC and TD combined cheque processing in 1996, the operation cut 21 processing sites to seven while moving the banks onto one technology platform. Customers still chose among competing banks. The repetitive work behind cheque processing no longer had to be reproduced three times.
The Big Six returned to that model this year. In February, they invested with CanDeal in a common third party risk solution intended to reduce repeated supplier checks and standardize due diligence. CanDeal hasn't disclosed how much the banks invested or published enough results to judge the pilot yet.
Banks can share the plumbing where duplication adds cost, then compete on products, pricing, service and customers.
Tokenized deposits make the shared infrastructure question more practical. One bank can digitize its own deposits, but interbank use requires agreement on how the claim is preserved, how compliance controls apply and how settlement is completed. That is where common rules become necessary.
Interac's history also shows how access can impact a shared network. The Competition Bureau previously challenged Interac's restrictions that limited competitors' access to the network. The resulting agreement widened participation and required access to the technical information needed to connect. Later changes gave Interac an independent board and a for profit structure while keeping access open and non-discriminatory.
That history makes the new partnership's promise to include other deposit taking institutions worth watching. Access rules haven't been published yet. The eventual treatment of smaller banks, credit unions and other eligible institutions could determine whether the project becomes widely useful Canadian infrastructure or mainly a shared capability for its six founding banks.
See How Canada Started Opening Its Financial Infrastructure
That question is more relevant now than it would have been a few years ago. Payments Canada has widened membership, regulated payment service providers have entered federal supervision, consumer driven banking is being implemented and Canada has enacted a stablecoin framework. A new tokenized deposit system would be entering a financial market where more firms are gaining roles in payments, data and digital money.
How Other Markets Are Testing Tokenized Bank Money
Banks and payment networks elsewhere are already testing different ways to keep commercial bank money useful as financial activity becomes more programmable.
| Initiative | Current Scale Or Stage | What It Adds To The Comparison |
| Kinexys by J.P. Morgan | More than US$4 trillion processed since inception and about US$7 billion daily. | A single global bank has already taken blockchain based payments, settlement and tokenization into production at substantial volume. |
| Citi Token Services | Live 24 hours a day across participating Citi markets. | Citi uses tokenized bank money for near real time cross border payments and liquidity transfers inside its own network. |
| Great British Tokenised Deposits | Seven banks and building societies participating in a live industry pilot. | The UK is testing shared tokenized deposits against marketplace payments, remortgaging and digital asset settlement rather than leaving the use cases theoretical. |
| The Clearing House | Owned by 25 large U.S. financial institutions and developing interbank clearing and settlement for tokenized commercial bank money. | The model connects tokenized deposits with existing RTP and CHIPS payment infrastructure and says banks of all sizes will be able to participate. |
| BankChain Alliance | Thirty nine U.S. state banking associations are developing bank owned blockchain infrastructure targeted for 2027. | The proposed ownership model is designed to give community and regional banks a role in common digital money infrastructure. |
The UK project is interesting because it's testing specific jobs that tokenized deposits could do. Those include marketplace payments, remortgaging and digital asset settlement. UK Finance and EY identified more than 40 potential business benefits and estimated that tokenized deposits could generate more than £3 billion in economic benefit.
The U.S. examples take different approaches. J.P. Morgan and Citi have built their own bank networks for institutional clients. The Clearing House is taking a shared industry approach so tokenized commercial bank money can clear between institutions and connect with payment systems that already exist.
Canada hasn't yet said which structure it plans to use. The Big Six partnership could become a common platform, a set of interoperable bank issued tokens or something else. Canada's earlier bank partnerships show that sharing core infrastructure can reduce duplication. The international examples also show that the real test will be whether the system supports useful transactions at scale.
The Big Six partnership will be judged by whether it can support useful transactions at lower cost and with less duplication than existing systems.
Talking Point
Canada's largest banks have successfully shared payment, identity, processing and risk infrastructure before. Can they do the same with tokenized deposits while giving enough institutions access for the partnership to become useful national infrastructure?
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