Singapore’s Tokenisation Shift: What Flutterwave, Figure, and DBS Signal for Payment

Three stories from this week show the same shift from a different angle. Tokenisation is moving from an institutional showcase into retail customers, real estate and emerging markets. Africa’s largest payments network just embedded a stablecoin into its rails. A US blockchain capital marketplace just bought one of the country’s biggest non-bank residential lenders to put it on the chain. And Singapore’s largest bank is opening tokenised gold to its retail customers. Here is what is happening, and why it matters for merchants, partners and financial institutions.

Flutterwave Hits 3.2 Billion Dollars With Ripple As A Strategic Investor

On 16 June, Flutterwave, Africa’s largest payments infrastructure company, announced the completion of a Series E funding round that values the business at 3.2 billion dollars and confirmed Ripple as a strategic investor. The exact round size has not been disclosed, but the company has now raised more than 500 million dollars in total and processed more than one billion transactions worth over 50 billion dollars across 34 African countries since launching in 2016. Earlier this year, Flutterwave also secured a Nigerian banking licence through the acquisition of open-banking specialist Mono, expanding from pure payment infrastructure into deposit-taking and broader financial services.

The partnership with Ripple is built on three core pillars: embedding the RLUSD stablecoin into Flutterwave’s payment rails and Send App remittance corridors as a primary settlement asset for high-volume channels, leveraging the XRP Ledger for faster transaction clearing, and deploying a unified API to bridge Flutterwave’s domestic network with Ripple Payments. The aim is to combine traditional fiat methods, including local cards, mobile wallets and bank transfers, with enterprise blockchain settlement, removing the multi-day delays and inflated FX margins that have long defined African cross-border payments. As Flutterwave CEO Olugbenga Agboola put it, the company is building a payment superhighway that connects African commerce directly to the global economy.

Why it matters: This is one of the most significant signals yet that stablecoins are crossing into emerging-market payment infrastructure, not just developed-market settlement. Africa has many of the highest remittance costs and slowest correspondent banking corridors in the world, which is exactly where the cost and speed advantages of regulated stablecoins matter most. Expect more partnerships of this shape across Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia, and expect them to gradually reshape the economics of cross-border commerce for SMEs and consumers.

The Debia angle: We have consistently argued that the future of cross-border payments is interoperability between traditional rails and compliant digital assets, with the experience kept simple for the merchant. Flutterwave’s deal is a strong example of how that thesis plays out in practice. A regulated African payment network embeds a regulated stablecoin into the same infrastructure merchants already use, while keeping local cards, mobile wallets and bank transfers in the mix. That orchestration layer, which hides the plumbing and exposes the value, is exactly what Debia is built to provide for the businesses we serve.

Figure Acquires Kiavi for 717 Million Dollars To Push Tokenisation Into US Real Estate Lending

On 10 June, Figure Technology Solutions, the Nasdaq-listed blockchain-native capital marketplace, announced a definitive agreement to acquire Kiavi, an AI-powered lending platform for residential real estate investors, in a deal valued at 717 million dollars. Under the transaction, Figure will acquire Kiavi’s technology and operating platform, while a joint venture between Figure and global investment firm Sixth Street will purchase Kiavi’s balance-sheet assets. Kiavi, founded as LendingHome in 2013, has funded more than 30 billion dollars in loans and reported more than 250 million dollars in revenue and more than 100 million dollars in EBITDA last year.

The strategic logic combines scale and on-chain infrastructure. Figure currently accounts for around 75 percent of real-world asset tokenisation. Kiavi is expected to add more than seven billion dollars per year in new first-lien origination volume to Figure Connect, the firm’s blockchain-native marketplace, and more than 100 million dollars per month in flow to Democratized Prime, its on-chain warehouse platform. The deal will also serve as the inaugural use case for Adaptor, Figure’s newly launched AI product designed for agent-to-agent onboarding, which standardises originator data across asset classes and can save partners months of integration time. Figure CEO Michael Tannenbaum described the transaction as a further pole vault into tokenisation, first-lien diversification and the company’s agentic AI platform.

Why it matters: This is the most direct statement yet that real-world asset tokenisation is moving from synthetic assets and pilots into the largest pools of US private credit. Residential real estate lending is a multi-trillion dollar market, and moving its origination, warehousing and distribution onto tokenised rails would meaningfully change capital efficiency, transparency and access for investors. Expect more incumbents in lending, asset management and capital markets to react, and expect agent-to-agent onboarding to become a recurring theme as AI agents start to do more of the connective work between institutions.

The Debia angle: The interesting signal for the broader payments industry is that AI and tokenisation are increasingly arriving as a single bundle. Figure is not just buying volume, it is building an agentic data layer that lets new originators plug into tokenised infrastructure with very little manual work. That same principle applies to payments. As more flows move across multiple rails and asset types, the providers who can orchestrate them through clean data and intelligent automation will win. Debia’s focus on infrastructure that hides complexity for merchants and partners reflects the same logic.

DBS Opens Tokenised Gold to Retail Customers in Singapore

In Singapore, DBS Bank announced on 11 June that it will offer tokenised physical gold to retail customers through its digibank app in the second half of 2026, the first such offering in Singapore to let mass-market customers digitally access, hold and trade tokenised physical gold through a single platform. Each DBS Physical Gold Token will be backed one-to-one by a gram of physical bullion, worth roughly SGD 200, held in a dedicated DBS vault in Singapore. Customers will be able to trade around the clock, settle near-instantly through atomic settlement, buy fractional amounts and redeem tokens for physical gold. DBS is also exploring listing the tokens on its DBS Digital Exchange (DDEx) for accredited and institutional investors.

The launch sits inside a broader DBS digital-asset roadmap. In 2025, the bank tokenised structured notes on Ethereum and listed sgBENJI, the token of Franklin Templeton’s tokenised money market fund. Physical gold holdings among DBS’s affluent clients have more than doubled over the past three years, and tokenisation is now being used to bring that exposure to a much broader audience. DBS is entering an increasingly competitive Singapore market for tokenised bullion. OCBC launched its GOLDX tokenised gold fund in April 2026 in partnership with Lion Global Investors and DigiFT, running on Ethereum and Solana and aimed at institutional and accredited investors. With DBS targeting the retail segment through digibank, Singapore is establishing itself as one of the most active markets in Asia for tokenised real-world assets from regulated banks.

Why it matters: Tokenisation has spent years being framed as wholesale and institutional. A major bank rolling out tokenised gold for the mass retail customer changes that narrative materially. It puts 24/7 access, fractional ownership and atomic settlement in the hands of ordinary investors, while keeping the asset inside the regulated banking system. Expect more retail-facing tokenised products from established banks across Asia, particularly in gold, fund units and structured notes, as customer demand for digital access to traditional asset classes deepens.

The Debia angle: This launch sits inside a Debia-friendly thesis: the most consequential applications of tokenisation will be the ones that quietly improve everyday experiences, like 24/7 access, smaller minimums and faster settlement, while keeping trust anchored in regulated institutions. DBS is doing exactly that with gold. The same instinct sits at the heart of how Debia builds payment infrastructure. The value is in offering merchants and customers a cleaner, faster, more flexible experience underpinned by strong rails, regardless of whether the value moving underneath is a card transaction, a stablecoin settlement or a tokenised asset.

At Debia, we track these changes because the future of payments will be shaped by speed, trust, interoperability, and smarter financial infrastructure. We do not just process payments. We understand the infrastructure, regulation, technology, and market shifts behind the future of digital commerce, and we build for where the ecosystem is heading next.