Tokenised money is moving from experimentation to infrastructure. For customer-owned banks, there is an opportunity to participate now and help shape trusted, interoperable settlement models, before they are designed by others.
Key takeaways
Tokenised money is rapidly evolving from a concept into infrastructure. For financial institutions, the question is no longer whether it will emerge, it’s here, but where it will deliver value first, who will shape the market architecture and how organisations can position themselves to compete.
This was the focus of Cuscal’s World Credit Union Conference panel, “How to compete in a tokenised world: from bank strategy to customer outcomes”, moderated by Freya Smith, Chief Client Officer at Cuscal, on 22, July 2026. The session brought together perspectives from Cuscal, Emerging Payments Association Asia, ICON Future Technologies and Imperium Markets to examine what tokenised money means in practice for customer-owned banks, mutuals and credit unions.
Rather than debating stablecoins, deposit tokens and CBDCs in theory, the panel focused on a more practical question: as money becomes programmable, conditional and capable of moving with data, what changes for funding, liquidity, settlement, compliance and customer outcomes?
Nathan Churchward, Cuscal’s Head of Product Solutions and Innovation, noted that tokenisation is likely to reshape financial infrastructure, long before customers notice any visible change:
“This shows up first in the plumbing, not in the shop front. The customer impact will come later, but the infrastructure choices start much earlier.”
Immediate value of tokenised money is not simply making everyday payments faster. It is the ability to link money, data and conditions together in ways existing payment systems struggle to support. The impact is likely to be felt first in areas where settlement delays, reconciliation effort, trapped liquidity and operational complexity still carry real cost.
For many Customer Owned Banks, tokenisation can sound like a retail payments story. The panel challenged that assumption. The strongest early use cases are likely to sit in wholesale settlement, institutional flows, funding and liquidity management. These are the areas where timing, certainty and coordination matter most, and where existing processes still rely heavily on manual work, delayed settlement cycles and fragmented data. This matters because, ‘institution to institution’ changes can move much faster than retail changes that rely on customer behaviour changing. Whereas, when there are real benefits in funding and liquidity, financial institutions will act fast to capitalise on the opportunity and be quick to use the advantage.
You can see this shift taking form in initiatives such as Project Acacia, where industry participants are testing tokenised settlement in real market scenarios. The questions being explored are increasingly practical: how value moves between institutions, how settlement risk can be reduced, how liquidity can be used more efficiently, and how different forms of money might work together.
For customer-owned banks, funding is not a back-office consideration. It directly affects competitiveness, lending capacity and the ability to serve members. Stu Burns, CEO of Imperium Markets, described today’s wholesale term deposit market as highly inefficient, with activity often still occurring through phone, email, spreadsheets and legacy systems. He believes tokenisation could create a more transparent marketplace, supporting direct investor access, real-time data, instant settlement and reduced reconciliation.
“Tokenisation really is about democratising markets. It’s about creating greater transparency and efficiency, and I think the mutuals will be huge beneficiaries of that.”
This is where the opportunity becomes tangible. Tokenisation is not about replacing trusted financial institutions. Done well, it can give them new ways to access liquidity, compete in funding markets and participate in emerging infrastructure without needing to build everything themselves.
Australia has already made significant progress on payment speed. The next shift is from moving money quickly to coordinating money with conditions, data and obligations attached. This is where programmability becomes important. As Nathan Churchward explained, “tokenised money allows settlement, ownership, data and conditions to come together in the same environment. Instead of payment being the final step after a process, money can become part of the workflow, released when conditions are met and matched to the asset or obligation being settled.”
In practical terms, that could allow funds to be released automatically when a property settlement completes, when goods are delivered, when a loan covenant is satisfied, or when a tokenised asset changes ownership. The payment becomes embedded into the contractual exchange process rather than sitting beside it.
Cuscal’s current thinking reflects this layered view. The market should not be reduced to a binary choice between stablecoins and deposit tokens. Different use cases will require different combinations of money, settlement controls, custody, compliance, interoperability and user experience.
This also suggests the future is likely to be multi-rail. Stablecoins, deposit tokens, existing account-to-account payments and other settlement assets may all play different roles. The important question lies in how they work together. Camilla Bullock, CEO of Emerging Payments Association Asia, sees interoperability as critical to realising the benefits of tokenisation.
“If we’re going to capture the value, we need to have the interoperability working to enable broad participation.”
Without interoperability, tokenisation risks creating the same fragmentation it seeks to solve. Different ledgers, tokens and platforms may emerge, but if they cannot connect, liquidity fragments and participation become harder, particularly for smaller and mid-tier institutions. This is where the RBA, with Project Accacia, is taking Australia into great territory. By conducting centralised trials with a variety of market participants, they are creating the shared language of tokenisation for Australia. This separates Australia from the US where private led initiatives have driven fragmentation and the UK where strict central control has slowed progress. All of this suggests that Australia will move much faster with less fragmentation and less constriction from central control.
For many boards and executive teams, the immediate concern is not the technology itself. It is risk: AML/CTF, fraud, scams, operational resilience, regulatory expectations and reputational exposure. Clearly those risks continue to exist in a tokenised environment. The good news is that the technology brings new ways address these challenges.
Andrea Zannier, CEO of ICON Future Technologies, described one of the most important features of the technology as “compliance by design”. In a tokenised environment, payments can be programmed to follow defined approval steps, controls and boundaries. If the process is designed correctly, transactions can stop when required conditions are not met.
That does not reduce the need for governance. If anything, it makes governance more important. Rules, roles, access, monitoring and accountability need to be built into the system from the beginning, not added after the fact.
This is a key distinction between tokenised money in regulated financial infrastructure and more speculative crypto narratives. The opportunity is not to move outside trusted systems. It is to modernise how trusted systems operate and leverage the technology to make them even safer.
Emerging international models are also testing hybrid approaches, where deposit tokens and stablecoins serve different purposes rather than competing as a single winner-takes-all model. Some models explore how bank deposits could gain stablecoin-like attributes such as programmability and continuous settlement while maintaining stronger links to regulated banking relationships.
Cuscal’s framing is consistent with this approach. Different use cases may require different forms of money and settlement infrastructure, from stablecoins to bank-issued tokenised deposits and existing account-based rails. The common requirement is not the token itself, but the controls, governance and interoperability that allow value to move safely across institutions.
The discussion is no longer confined to industry participants. Policy momentum is increasing.
The House of Representatives Standing Committee on Economics’ report, A Level Paying Field, examined schemes, digital wallets and innovation in Australia’s payments sector, including digital assets, stablecoins, CBDCs, tokenisation and Project Acacia. The report recommended that Treasury, as part of its strategic role in payment system modernisation and taking into account the findings of Project Acacia, establish a framework for enabling stablecoins as an alternate payment rail within the Australian payments system “as a matter of urgency”.
That does not mean every institution needs to launch a tokenised money product tomorrow. It does mean that infrastructure choices, standards and roles are starting to form.
For customer-owned banks, waiting for certainty may feel prudent. However, delay carries its own risks. If smaller and mid-tier institutions are absent while the market architecture is being discussed, the system may be shaped around others’ operating models, priorities and economics. Nathan Churchward warned that waiting carries its own risks:
“The risk of waiting is not missing a technology trend. It’s actually that your lending, funding and settlement workflows get designed by others, around others, and for others. Likely by those with vastly different resources, infrastructure, resource, values and goals to yourselves.”
The call to action from the panel was to engage deliberately.
Boards and executive teams should start with use cases, not technology. Where are settlement delays creating cost? Where is reconciliation still manual? Where is liquidity trapped? Where could programmable settlement reduce risk or improve member outcomes? Where might deposit movement or stablecoin adoption change the funding model? Where does the institution need a voice as standards and shared infrastructure are shaped?
Camilla Bullock encouraged institutions to “lean in and speak up”, and to “start small and learn through focused initiatives rather than waiting for a fully formed market”. Andrea Zannier put the challenge in very practical terms: “Look at the major business issues you have. Can you solve them with tokenisation?”
That is the right frame. Tokenisation should not be pursued because it is new. It should be explored in terms of where it addresses real friction, protects trusted relationships, supports competition or enables better service for members and customers.
For many institutions, the most practical starting point will be partnership and shared infrastructure. The winners are unlikely to be those that rebuild their technology stack from scratch. They will be the institutions that understand where to connect, which partners to work with, what standards matter and how to influence the infrastructure while it is still being formed.
Cuscal sees its role as helping extend trusted, regulated settlement infrastructure into the tokenised money era. The opportunity is not simply to issue another token, but to support the rules, controls and interoperability that allow tokenised value to move safely across institutions. That matters for customer-owned banks because the alternative is a market shaped by closed networks and single-institution models.
Cuscal’s focus is on practical pathways for participation – helping clients assess use cases, understand governance and compliance requirements, and access shared infrastructure without needing to build tokenisation capability on their own. The objective is to preserve trust, competition and broad participation as money, data and settlement become more closely connected.
In conversations with clients that Freya is having now, a key realisation for many, is that this is not just a technology question, nor is it only about tokens or stablecoins. For customer owned banks, the real question is what model of participation makes sense – where infrastructure needs to connect across payment types, where controls need to sit, and how clients can engage early enough to help shape outcomes rather than simply adapt to them later. Cuscal is encouraging boards and executive teams to start those conversations now.
References
House of Representatives Standing Committee on Economics, ‘A Level Paying Field: Inquiry into Schemes, Digital Wallets and Innovation in the Payments Sector’, Parliament of Australia website, report, June 2026, accessed 6 July 2026, <https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/House/Economics/PaymentsSector/Report>
Important Information: Information in this article is current as at 4 August 2026 and is subject to change. This article represents personal opinions and views only. This article is provided for general information purposes only and does not have regard to the situation or needs of any reader and must not be relied upon as advice. Before acting on this information, consider its appropriateness to your business Cuscal Limited ABN 95 087 822 455.
