Tokenised deposits continue to pique the interest of the banking industry, and Canada’s largest banks are looking for ways to make them more interoperable and frictionless.
Six of Canada’s largest banks are joining forces to collaborate on the development of tokenised deposits using the Canadian Dollar.
The first phase of the project will involve the six Canadian banks looking to move tokenised deposits across the country’s financial institutions, with a long-term goal of connecting these to other digital asset initiatives.
The participants of the project include: Bank of Montreal (BMO), Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC), National Bank of Canada (NBC), Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), The Bank of Nova Scotia (Scotiabank), and TD Bank Group (TD).
“This collaborative effort reflects a shared view that as digital money evolves globally, Canada’s payments infrastructure must continue to be competitive and secure,” said the banks in a joint statement.
“This project is exploring tokenised deposit solutions to drive responsible innovation and facilitate broad participation in the digital money ecosystem for the benefit of all Canadians. It seeks to deliver faster, more efficient and programmable payments to Canadian customers while preserving safety, stability, and effective regulatory oversight.”
The six banks stated tokenised deposits are just the first step in its bid to digitise its capital and financial markets, which may also include stablecoins in the near future.
How Canada has prepared for tokenised deposits
Canada’s Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions (OSFI) stated recently in September 2026 it classifies tokenised deposits as non-distinct from conventional bank deposits.
Therefore, this means tokenising a commercial bank deposit from one of the aforementioned six Canadian banks would be a legal deposit liability if placed and processed on distributed ledger technology (DLT), thus not creating a new financial asset.
Because tokenised deposits operate within the existing banking parameters, they abide by traditional banking regulations and face limited barriers unlike digital alternatives such as stablecoins, which require new forms of legislation for issuers and providers to comply with.
An interoperable tokenised deposit project would align all six of Canada’s largest banks to help unearth 24/7 programmable deposit use cases.
Alongside the six banks working alongside one another on tokenised deposits, the Bank of Canada has been leveraging the Bank for International Settlements’ Project Agorá’s research into how tokenised financial assets can instantly settle across multiple global banking networks.
How Canada’s approach differs from the US
Many of the leading US banks – JP Morgan, Citi, Bank of America, Wells Fargo – have been at the forefront of the surge in banking interest in tokenised deposits over the past year.
US banks have opted to either partner with another bank to test live tokenised deposit settlements – including non-US banks for multi-currency settlements – or launch standalone, in-house projects, such as JP Morgan’s JPM Coin and Citi’s Citi Token Services.
There is, however, The Clearing House Shared Network which includes Bank of America, BNY Mellon, Citi, and Wells Fargo, to test commercial bank deposits on-chain using the existing traditional banking environments.
Some of the use cases for tokenised deposits being developed on the shared network include unlocking trapped liquidity, cross-border business-to-business payments, and to perform settlements on weekends and holidays when traditional rails, such as FedWire and ACH are offline.
Canada’s big six bank project will look to differ from its US counterparts by finding more interoperable and less friction across frameworks by consolidating this into one system to settle tokenised deposits across all six banks.
This will occur under the oversight of the OSFI by leveraging its guidance to use tokenised deposits for direct and instant commercial deposits, under the necessary regulatory limits.
