Two participants of the HKMA’s Project Ensemble sandbox have gone on to forge ties to boost payment transparency and resilience
With the financial landscape and corporate treasury function undergoing rapid transformation, corporate clients have increasingly been requiring their banking partners to support them in achieving better access, visibility, and control of their working capital, and provide ‘always-on’ availability, liquidity and speed of payment flows.
This has motivated corporate treasurers and financial institutions to implement the latest technologies in their treasury operations to achieve optimal efficiencies in their inter-group settlements, and to embrace innovation and partnerships that can deliver value-added solutions to their corporate and financial institution clients.
On 30 Oct 2024, Standard Chartered (SC) and Ant International announced the successful completion of HKD-denominated intra-group blockchain transactions between Ant International entities. Both signatories are participants of the Hong Kong Monetary Authority’s Ensemble Sandbox. This is
a wholesale central bank digital currency (wholesale CBDC or wCBDC) project that seeks to explore innovative financial market infrastructure for seamless interbank settlement of tokenized money through wCBDC.
Central to the program is reportedly a next-generation treasury management solution that utilizes blockchain technology, advanced encryption and AI to improve the efficiency and transparency of fund movements. The idea is to build more transparent, efficient, and secure infrastructure for global payments by integrating innovation directly into the SC’s payment systems.
Said SC’s Head of Hong Kong and Greater China & North Asia, and Global Head (Market Management, Transaction Banking), Anthony Lin: “Inefficient working capital costs corporate clients significant revenue drag and we, at Standard Chartered, are committed to adopting the latest technology and collaborating with our regulatory stakeholders to enable the next phase of financial market infrastructure powered by blockchain and tokenization.”
According to Ant International’s Head of Platform Tech, Kelvin Li: “We are proud of the milestone we have achieved through this collaboration with Standard Chartered, and the impact it will have on how businesses manage their global liquidity in the future…,” adding that the collaboration will allow financial institutions involved to “leverage tokenization to facilitate cross-border transactions in a more efficient, secure and seamless manner.”
