Canada's six biggest banks just agreed to build shared plumbing for digital money.
RBC, TD, BMO, Scotiabank, CIBC and National Bank announced Tuesday they're jointly exploring a Canadian-dollar tokenized deposit system. The first phase focuses on moving deposits between the banks themselves, not into consumer wallets.
A tokenized deposit is a regular bank deposit represented as a digital token on a shared ledger—same money, same bank, same rules, just using a different network. It is not a new cryptocurrency, and it is not a CBDC either.
The banks want the system “competitive and secure,” as they put it in their joint statement, while keeping the safeguards that already govern commercial bank money. They also want the door open for other Canadian deposit-taking institutions to eventually join.
Moving money between banks in Canada today is quite slow to clear outside a basic e-transfer. A shared token system would, in theory, let banks settle those transfers instantly and around the clock, with payments that can be programmed to trigger automatically—like releasing funds the moment a shipment clears customs.
Customers likely wouldn't see any of this directly. It would just run in the background, the same way nobody thinks about the wiring behind an ACH transfer today.
This is a different project from Canada's actual digital-dollar debate. The Bank of Canada ran a public consultation on a possible digital Canadian dollar in 2023 that drew almost 90,000 responses. Eighty-five percent of respondents said they would not use a hypothetical digital Canadian dollar, and many placed a high value on privacy and continued access to cash.
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In the United States, JPMorgan, Citi, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo are building a rival tokenized deposit network through The Clearing House—the bank-owned real-time payments operator—targeting a first-half 2027 launch, largely to keep stablecoins from siphoning off deposits. Thirty-nine U.S. state banking associations have their own version too, the BankChain Alliance , aimed at community and regional lenders.
Canada’s Scotiabank and TD are named among the 21 banks backing a separate joint U.S. dollar stablecoin , also targeting the first half of 2027—meaning the same institutions are betting on tokenized deposits and stablecoins at once.
Another bank, BMO went live this year as the first bank on CME Group's tokenized cash platform on Google Cloud, letting institutional clients move U.S. dollars around the clock for margin and collateral.
The six Canadian banks haven't set a launch date. The first phase stays limited to transfers between the participating institutions, with opening the system to other deposit-taking players still just a stated goal, not a commitment.