• Singapore’s largest bank, DBS, has partnered with Ant International to develop a blockchain-powered treasury and liquidity management solution.
• With DBS Treasury Tokens, Ant International will cut down the settlement time for intragroup transactions from days to seconds while slashing costs.

Singapore’s DBS Bank has announced a new partnership with Ant International, where the latter will rely on the lender’s blockchain solutions for its treasury and liquidity management solutions.

DBS, Singapore’s largest bank, operates a permissioned blockchain solution that it has now integrated with Ant International’s Whale Platform, a treasury management solution that leverages blockchain, AI and other technologies to enhance efficiency and transparency.

Whale Platform is now integrating the DBS blockchain and, with it, the DBS Treasury Tokens, which the lender recently launched. This allows the company to have an instant and multi-currency treasury and liquidity management solution across different markets.

Ant International is a subsidiary of Alibaba Group, China’s tech and finance behemoth, which operates the world’s largest mobile and online payment platform, Alipay, with over 1.3 billion users.

Kevin Li, who heads the company’s platform technology, described the partnership as “an important step forward in addressing challenges like reducing costs and transaction risks for cross-border payments.”

He added:

We have already seen successful use cases on our Whale platform in areas such as instant tax refund services and SME cross-border payments, and we will continue working together with industry partners and leveraging blockchain technology to enable more open and inclusive cross-border payments.

Blockchain in Treasury and Liquidity Management

Ant International is based in Singapore but has operations across the rest of Asia and beyond. It owns several subsidiaries across multiple diverse markets and needs to manage revenue collection, payments, cash positions, and more across a variety of currencies. These transactions can sometimes take days, holding up billions of dollars in liquidity. The new integration with the DBS Treasury Tokens solves this.

Lim Soon Chong, the bank’s head of global transactions services, noted:

This new capability comes at a time when the treasury needs of businesses are evolving to meet the rise of e-commerce and on-demand services on a 24/7 basis. DBS’ permissioned blockchain also forms the building block for new efficiencies and capabilities in traditional banking services, such as programmable, fractionalised and atomic value transfer.

The DBS Treasury Tokens come at a time when tokenization is taking root globally. The bank has been participating in two of the Singaporean central bank’s token projects—Project Orchid and Project Guardian.

Chainlink Eyes New Market

As we’ve reported previously, tokenization unlocks trillions in liquidity, enhances transparency, and opens up new business models. Some, like BCG, predict that this will be a $10+ trillion market.

One of the key players in this rise is Chainlink. Tokenization relies on real-world data, which on-chain applications and smart contracts can’t access on their own. Chainlink’s oracles bridge this gap, while its interoperability solutions, such as CCIP, enable the movement of funds and messages across hundreds of blockchains.

LINK trades at $10.46, gaining 4% in the past day.