Citi to Launch 24/7 Tokenized Deposit Transfers for Japanese Firms by Year-End

Points of Focus

• Citi plans 24/7 tokenized deposit remittances for Japanese firms by year-end
• This is Citi’s third parallel tokenized deposit initiative running simultaneously
• Roughly 40 Japanese banks already launched a domestic tokenized deposit trial

Citigroup plans to launch a tokenized deposit remittance service for Japanese corporate clients as early as this year, enabling instant foreign-currency transfers around the clock, including nights and holidays.

JUST IN: Citi will offer instant cross-border payments to Japanese firms using blockchain technology.

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Shamil Karik, Citi’s global head of services, confirmed the plan directly to Nikkei, without disclosing a specific launch date or pricing.

Citi’s Japan corridors and minimal onboarding process

Companies will be able to move funds between Japan and Citi’s branches in the United States, the United Kingdom, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Ireland, executing payments at night or on public holidays when correspondent desks are shut. Client-side onboarding is minimal: treasury teams select the token-service option in an existing transfer screen, with Citi absorbing the related operational and risk-management work.

Nikkei describes this as a first for Japanese clients from a foreign financial institution, a claim worth treating as credible but company-sourced rather than independently verified against every other foreign bank operating in Japan. Karik positioned Japan as one of Citi’s principal global markets, positioning the launch as strategic rather than experimental.

Citi runs three parallel tokenized deposit tracks at once

This isn’t Citi’s first tokenized deposit initiative. It’s at least its third parallel track running simultaneously. 

Citi Token Services, the proprietary platform behind this Japan plan, integrated with Citi’s own 24/7 USD Clearing network in September 2025, reaching over 250 banks across more than 40 markets, then expanded to support Euro transactions and a Dublin footprint that November.

Separately, Citi tested a weekend USD payment with DBS on September 5 using SWIFT’s shared, multi-bank Digital Ledger, an entirely different piece of infrastructure from its own proprietary platform.

Citi is also involved in a third initiative, a US bank-owned tokenized deposit network through The Clearing House alongside JPMorgan and Bank of America, targeting a 2027 launch. Three structurally different approaches, proprietary platform, shared industry ledger, and bank consortium, are all advancing at the same time.

Citi’s tokenized deposits already process $1B daily

The scale behind Citi’s own platform is substantial rather than experimental. 

Citi moves roughly $6 trillion across its network daily, and transfers already executed through tokenized deposits reach approximately $1 billion daily currently. 

That’s real, ongoing production volume, worth weighing against the more limited, single-transaction nature of the SWIFT-DBS test, which hasn’t yet demonstrated comparable scale.

Japanese banks already race toward tokenized deposits

Citi’s “first foreign institution” framing sits inside a market where domestic competition is already well underway. 

Roughly 40 Japanese banks launched a domestic tokenized deposit transfer trial on August 26, and Japan Post Bank has separately announced plans to launch its own tokenized yen, DCJPY, by fiscal year 2026, backed by $1.29 trillion in deposits across 120 million customer accounts.

DCJPY is built for domestic settlement of digital securities rather than cross-border corporate remittances, a genuinely different use case than Citi’s foreign-currency transfer service. But the scale gap is worth stating directly: Japan Post Bank’s initiative dwarfs Citi’s corporate-only offering by deposit base and customer count, even if the two products don’t compete head-on for the same transactions. 

Citi may be first among foreign institutions specifically, but it’s entering a domestic market where local players are already moving in parallel on their own tokenized infrastructure.

What tokenized deposits actually solve for treasuries

The practical problem tokenized deposits solve is concrete. 

Conventional cross-border transfers are locked to banking hours in both sending and receiving jurisdictions, forcing corporate treasuries to send payments early and hold idle buffer capital against settlement gaps.

Removing that constraint is a real, quantifiable efficiency gain for treasury operations, distinct from the more abstract case often made for blockchain-based finance generally, and it’s the specific reason banks across at least four different structural approaches are converging on the same underlying goal at the same time.