On Friday 23 October, Bank Negara Malaysia and the Bank of Thailand joined BLOOM, the initiative the Monetary Authority of Singapore launched in October 2025 to let financial institutions settle cross-border payments in tokenised bank deposits and regulated stablecoins. Three central banks in one region now share a working agenda for money that moves on tokens, with Visa, Mastercard, Ripple, Airwallex and the World Bank Group among the participants. Trade finance is named in its scope.
It is a real step, and it arrives with a price tag attached. A month earlier, Capgemini’s World Payments Report 2027 surveyed 1,110 corporates with revenues above USD 1 billion. 74% described cross-border payments as slow, costly and unpredictable. And the report estimated that up to USD 4 trillion sits in settlement and liquidity accounts whose only job is to make those payments possible.
Four trillion dollars, parked. That number is about more than payments.
Everyone already pays for not trusting the other side.
You have paid it yourself. The deposit on an apartment. The hotel that holds an amount on your card at check-in. The builder who asks for a third up front. None of these is a fee for a service. It is money set aside because two parties cannot yet see whether the other will do what they promised, and the deposit stands in for that missing view.
Organisations do the same at scale. A company prefunds an account abroad so suppliers are paid on time. A bank holds a buffer at a correspondent so payments clear on a Friday. The money is not lost, but it does no work while it waits. The more strangers a business deals with, the more of its cash ends up as a deposit somewhere.
Faster money shrinks the deposit. It does not remove the reason for it.
This is what BLOOM and its peers can genuinely fix. If a payment settles in minutes, at any hour, the buffer needed to cover the wait between sending and arriving gets smaller. Part of that four trillion can come home. That is a good outcome, and it is the right place for central banks to start.
But the buffer exists for two reasons, not one. Part of it covers the time the money takes to travel. The rest covers the time it takes to know whether the other side has delivered. Tokens shorten the first. They do nothing, on their own, for the second.
In trade, the wait is for the goods.
A Japanese exporter on a common term, 30% in advance and 70% against a copy of the bill of lading, already knows this. The 30% is a deposit paid by the buyer. The 70% is a deposit of trust paid by the exporter: the cargo has sailed, the title document is in someone’s hands, and the money arrives when the buyer decides it does. No payment rail, however fast, changes when the buyer decides.
Where the time actually goes
On the corridors we work on, the transfer itself is rarely the slowest step. The days are spent between events: the bill of lading issued, the documents checked, the title endorsed, the payment instructed. Each event lives in a different system, owned by a different party, and the money waits for a person to connect them.
What a letter of credit really buys
This is why letters of credit are coming back on larger deals and new relationships. A bank stands between two strangers and promises to pay against documents. The undertaking is valuable. It is also slow, because the promise is tied to paper examination rather than to the shipment event itself.
The next step is money that waits for the right event.
The useful question is not whether a token can cross a border. BLOOM will answer that. The question is whether the payment can be told what to wait for: release when the title moves, not when someone remembers to send it. Then neither side has to pay first, and the deposit of trust becomes unnecessary.
Three conditions for it to work
- The trade event has to be recorded where both sides and the bank can see it, not reported by one party to another.
- The payment has to be held in a regulated form, such as a tokenised deposit, so the money is real from the start.
- The rule that links the two has to be agreed in advance, so release needs no one’s further say.
What stays hard
Cross-border, the two halves rarely sit in one jurisdiction. The exporter’s bank may accept a tokenised deposit; the importer’s bank may not recognise it at all. Any honest design has to say what happens on the leg where the token stops.
This is the layer we are building.
At STANDAGE we work on exactly this joint: linking the record of a shipment, including the electronic bill of lading, to a payment that is held until the title moves. With BitTrade we showed a cross-border payment received, converted and withdrawable as ordinary yen on the same business day. This week we started a joint study with a tokenised-deposit platform and a bank on settling the bill of lading and the payment as one step. Faster money is the foundation. Conditional money is what trade needs on top of it.
The litmus test
Take your last ten export shipments. For each one, write down two dates: the day the title left your control, and the day the money arrived.
The gap between them is your deposit of trust, measured in days and in yen. If it is longer than the transit time of the money itself, a faster rail will not close it. Who, on your side, decides when that gap is acceptable?
