DBS has put a figure on how far large companies have moved tokenised money into ordinary treasury work. In The Great Rewiring: Money in a New Order, published on 28 October 2026, the bank surveyed 422 leaders at companies with annual revenue above US$500 million, across 11 markets, between mid-June and mid-July. Eighty-eight per cent were already deploying or piloting tokenised money, chiefly to fund expansion and to manage liquidity. For investors, the question is where corporate cash is starting to sit: not only on conventional payment and settlement rails, but also in claims that differ in credit, yield and redemption.
The instrument mix should not be averaged away. Stablecoins were the most common, with 63 per cent using them or planning to, against 53 per cent for tokenised deposits and 52 per cent for tokenised money market funds. A stablecoin is a payment claim. Lim Soon Chong, group head of global transaction services at DBS, pointed to greater fungibility across payment intermediaries and lighter permissioning, and also to the difficulty of making stablecoins comply with anti-money-laundering norms and with enterprise use. A tokenised deposit remains a bank liability. A tokenised money market fund is the holding that behaves like an investment: it carries yield, a fee and a liquidity promise that has to hold in stress. Folding the three into one bucket would hide the credit and redemption risks that decide whether the position counts as cash.
Lim said at a media briefing on Tuesday that tokenisation was going mainstream faster than DBS had expected, and that companies were adapting rather than waiting. The cleaner capital signal is the bank's own budget. DBS still invests less in tokenised money than in traditional fiat and in traditional payment and settlement rails. He said that balance was expected to change, and that investment in tokenised money could potentially catch up with and exceed investment in traditional money within two to three years. That is an internal allocation, not a market forecast. It indicates where one major transaction bank is ready to add infrastructure spend, which is where custody, settlement and the cost of holding tokenised funds may be built out sooner.
Corporate adoption is no longer the open question; the open question is which tokenised claim an investor can hold as cash without taking unmarked credit, redemption or compliance risk.
Most leaders expect the gains they associate with tokenised money, notably better traceability and auditability, within two years. Regulation runs on a different clock. Lim said mainstream use will depend on users, on other intermediaries and on how rules develop. Traceability can improve a treasurer's audit trail. It does not settle reserve quality, redemption at par, or eligibility as cash inside an institutional mandate. The compliance friction he described around stablecoins is the screen that matters. The 63 per cent figure is evidence of corporate use and planning, not a basis for warehousing the same balances in size.
Currency choice belongs in the same decision. More than three-quarters of respondents had adapted their operations and expanded into new markets against volatility and trade fragmentation. South-east Asia was the top destination, named by 65 per cent, ahead of Australia and New Zealand at 50 per cent and India at 45 per cent. Separately, 78 per cent had diversified away from traditional settlement currencies by building exposure to several currencies that support more trading corridors. The report said the renminbi is gaining acceptance as a trade settlement currency, with higher adoption where trade with mainland China is deep and proximity is close, including Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea, Indonesia and Singapore. Respondents in Australia and the UK showed the strongest interest in considering renminbi use within one to two years.
Han Kwee Juan, group head of institutional banking at DBS, said organisations were dealing with changing trade routes, new forms of money and fast-moving artificial intelligence, and that leaders needed operating models able to manage liquidity, currencies and cross-border flows under shock. The survey shows adoption is already wide and leaves the underwriting question open. Large companies are choosing among stablecoins, tokenised deposits and tokenised money market funds, while spreading settlement across more currencies and more Asian corridors. It does not establish common terms for reserves, redemption, eligibility or fees. Until those terms are comparable, tokenised money is treasury behaviour to finance carefully, not a cash allocation to scale on the adoption rate alone.