BNP Paribas and Ant International are collaborating on several fronts for international payments. One area involves exploring tokenized deposits for global treasury management.
Ant has been working on its tokenized deposit solution, Whale, mainly in Hong Kong with the likes of HSBC. Last year it participated in Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) trials as part of the Fintech Supervisory Sandbox. It will also take part in Project Ensemble trials, an HKMA initiative exploring wholesale CBDC, with one of the CBDC’s purposes being to settle interbank transactions for tokenized deposits.
Tokenized deposits represent bank accounts on a blockchain. That’s comparatively straight forward for payments between branches of a single bank, but is more complex for interbank payments. While stablecoins involve a single token transfer, many tokenized deposit designs require an additional interbank payment, either done in the conventional manner or with a wholesale CBDC.
The Whale solution uses blockchain, cryptography and AI for a next generation treasury management solution. According to Ant, it enhances the efficiency and transparency of bank payments to improve global liquidity management.
Ant says it will use BNP Paribas’ infrastructure to further develop the Whale platform.
Meanwhile, the other aspects of the collaboration include BNP Paribas sponsoring WorldFirst’s participation in Europe’s SEPA payment scheme. WorldFirst is Ant’s SME payment platform for global businesses. Additionally, businesses using BNP Paribas’ merchant acquiring services (mainly involving stores accepting card payments) will also be able to accept payments from 25 Alipay+ international mobile partners.
