Swift brought onboard several European banks to help launch its first tokenised bond settlement trial.
Swift announced it completed the first trial of settling tokenised asset transactions on January 15, in its bid to bring forth new interoperability for global money movement.
The trial was conducted in collaboration with BNP Paribas Securities Services, Italian bank Intesa Sanpaolo, and Societe Generale – FORGE. The project sought to develop use cases for the “seamless exchange and settlement of tokenised bonds, while supporting payments in both fiat and digital currencies”, according Swift’s announcement.
Some of the key processes involved in the trial included delivery-versus-payment settlement, interest payouts and the redemption of tokenised bonds.
Swift leveraged Societe Generale’s blockchain subsidiary FORGE’s EURCV stablecoin to enable the delivery-versus-payment settlement. The French bank also supported the trail by enabling interest payouts and redemption.
Both BNP Paribas Securities Services and Intesa Sanpaolo acted as paying agents, completing all settlements of tokenised bonds on Swift’s existing global messaging network. This looked to create a use case for tokenised bonds to be settled on traditional messaging services and reduce the complexity of blockchain infrastructure for traditional finance institutions.
The trial also saw the integration of ISO 20022 messaging standards with blockchain-native platforms, creating compliant workflows for tokenised bonds.
“This milestone demonstrates how collaboration and interoperability will shape the future of capital markets,” said Thomas Dugauquier, Tokenised Assets Product Lead at Swift.
“By proving that Swift can orchestrate multi-platform tokenised asset transactions, we’re paving the way for our members to adopt digital assets with confidence, and at scale. It’s about creating a bridge between traditional finance and emerging technologies.
Swift sees a digital asset future shared and interoperable
The tokenised bond settlement trial follows Swift’s blockchain shared ledger during Sibos 2025 in September 2025.
This ledger, which aims to support instant, 24/7 cross-border payments, is one of the various avenues Swift have explored to bridge decentralised and traditional finance.
In 2022-2023, Swift ran trials to bridge blockchain networks, such as Ethereum, to payment rails using its infrastructure. The use cases from this demonstrated interoperable transactions on traditional and decentralised networks.
Swift confirmed the blockchain shared ledger will become the “foundation” for the next phase of its digital asset strategy.
The global payment messaging company aims to add the blockchain shared ledger to its infrastructure to extend its capabilities of settling tokenised assets through messaging and APIs, in shared environments with Swift acting as an entry point for companies to settle currencies and tokenised assets in a singular platform.
