Swift's Blockchain Ledger Goes Live with 17 Banks, EDX Markets Raises $76M and iFAST Eyes S$100 Billion

Three stories from the past week show regulated finance racing to build its own version of the speed and flexibility crypto has long promised, on infrastructure banks and regulators actually trust. Swift has switched on a blockchain ledger with 17 of the world's largest banks. An institutional crypto trading venue has landed fresh backing from one of Japan's biggest financial groups as it pursues a US bank charter. And Singapore's iFAST is quietly assembling one of Asia's most complete digital wealth and banking ecosystems. Here is what is happening, and why it matters for merchants, partners and financial institutions.

Swift's Blockchain Ledger Goes Live with 17 Banks

On 9 July, Swift announced from Brussels that its blockchain-based shared ledger is ready for initial use, marking the first live use case for infrastructure it first unveiled a year earlier and built in nine months with input from banks worldwide. Seventeen financial institutions spanning six continents are preparing to pilot live transactions: ANZ, BNP Paribas, BNY, Citi, DBS, First Abu Dhabi Bank, FirstRand, HSBC, Itau Unibanco, Lloyds, Mashreq, MUFG Bank, OCBC, Standard Chartered, UBS, UOB and Wells Fargo. The ledger acts as a secure orchestration layer for bank-issued tokenised deposits, digital versions of commercial bank money, held on each participating bank's own systems, letting them move customer funds overnight and on weekends before completing final settlement through existing payment rails.

Swift has been explicit that the ledger is designed to sit alongside existing infrastructure rather than replace it, preserving the compliance, credit, risk and control standards banks already rely on, a deliberate point of contrast with stablecoin-based alternatives some institutions remain cautious about for regulated flows. Cross-chain interoperability runs through Chainlink's CCIP protocol, moved from pilot to production in November 2025, letting banks route tokenised asset instructions using standard ISO 20022 messages with blockchain wallet addresses attached directly to payment instructions. Singapore's OCBC, one of the 17 pilot banks, said through Group Chief Strategy and Transformation Officer Melvyn Low that it has been building blockchain and tokenisation capabilities as part of a broader AI, digital and data strategy, and looks forward to enabling real-time, 24/7 cross-border tokenised transactions for its customers through the ledger. “With our new ledger capability, we're extending the trust and stability of established finance into the frontiers of digital money,” said Swift chief business officer Thierry Chilosi, noting the ledger creates a foundation for future innovation in programmable money and agentic commerce.

Why it matters: This is arguably the most significant institutional tokenisation milestone of the year, not because of any single feature, but because of who is participating. A 17-bank pilot spanning six continents, including three of Singapore's largest banks, gives Swift's approach a credible shot at the critical mass that industry voices have repeatedly said is the real barrier to scaling tokenised payments, more so than the underlying technology itself. Swift's positioning also matters strategically: it is racing to keep bank-led rails competitive against stablecoin issuers that already offer always-on settlement, without asking banks to give up the compliance architecture they have spent decades building. Expect the pilot group to expand quickly if early transactions perform as promised, and expect Swift's approach to become the reference model banks compare every other tokenisation initiative against.

The Debia angle: Swift's ledger captures exactly the principle Debia builds around: the future of settlement lies in extending trusted, compliant infrastructure to move at the speed digital money demands, not in abandoning that infrastructure for something faster but less accountable. Banks do not want to choose between speed and control, and Swift's design explicitly refuses to make them. For merchants and payment infrastructure providers, the practical signal is that tokenised deposits are moving from theoretical to operational this year among the world's largest banks, and payment orchestration that can route intelligently across tokenised and traditional rails alike will matter more with every pilot that goes live.

EDX Markets Raises $76 Million from SBI Holdings

On 7 July, EDX Markets, an institutional-only cryptocurrency trading platform backed by Citadel Securities, Fidelity Digital Assets, Charles Schwab, Paradigm and Sequoia Capital, closed a 76 million dollar Series C funding round led by Japan's SBI Holdings, bringing its later-stage funding to roughly 141 million dollars over eighteen months. EDX operates an institution-only marketplace that separates trading from custody and settlement through a central clearinghouse, a structure designed to mirror the risk controls and settlement standards of traditional securities markets rather than typical crypto exchanges. The new capital will fund expansion of EDX's trading, clearing and settlement capabilities, accelerate product development around its FlowConnect crypto-as-a-service offering, and support international growth, including a Singapore-based perpetual futures venue for eligible non-US institutional clients.

The funding lands as EDX pursues one of the more consequential regulatory moves in US institutional crypto: an application filed with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency in April to establish EDX Trust, a proposed national trust bank that would let the company offer regulated custody, clearing, settlement and risk management directly to institutional clients, rather than relying on third-party custodians. SBI Holdings brings its own deep digital asset track record to the deal, having recently launched JPYSC, described as Japan's first trust bank-backed yen stablecoin, and having agreed separately to acquire Japanese crypto exchange Bitbank for roughly 289 million dollars. “EDX has built and provides a robust, regulatory-compliant platform that addresses the growing demand for institutional digital asset infrastructure,” said SBI chairman and CEO Yoshitaka Kitao, adding that trusted market infrastructure is a critical foundation for institutional adoption.

Why it matters: Institutional crypto infrastructure keeps attracting serious capital even as broader crypto venture funding remains well below its 2021 peak, a signal that investors see regulated market plumbing, clearinghouses, custody and bank charters, as the durable long-term opportunity rather than trading volume itself. SBI's investment also builds a strategic bridge between Japan's fast-maturing regulated digital asset ecosystem and US institutional crypto infrastructure, potentially opening cross-border trading corridors that do not meaningfully exist today. Expect the OCC's decision on EDX Trust, whenever it lands, to be closely watched as a bellwether for how open US regulators remain to crypto-native firms holding full trust bank charters.

The Debia angle: EDX's approach mirrors a pattern Debia sees accelerating everywhere: institutional adoption of digital assets depends less on new trading features and more on whether custody, clearing and settlement meet the same standards institutions already expect from traditional finance. A bank charter is a credibility signal as much as a regulatory one, telling every compliance-heavy institution that this counterparty operates inside a well-understood framework. For merchants and payment infrastructure providers working across digital assets, the lesson is consistent: partners who invest early in regulatory credibility, not just product speed, are the ones large institutions will trust with meaningful volume.

iFAST Targets S$100 Billion in Assets as It Builds Asia's Wealth Stack

Forbes Asia this week profiled Lim Chung Chun, chairman and group CEO of Singapore-based iFAST Corporation, and the strategy behind what has become one of the region's most comprehensive independent wealth and digital banking platforms. Lim left his job as head of equity research at ING Barings Securities in 1998 and launched Fundsupermart.com in 2000, offering low-cost online access to mutual funds; today that business, now FSM Global, serves 1.2 million customer accounts with access to more than 29,000 investment products from over 350 fund houses. Unlike many fintech peers that picked either investing or banking, iFAST built both, and Lim's current focus is plugging iFAST Global Bank, a digital bank iFAST owns in the UK, directly into its investment platform to widen its customer base, particularly among the mass affluent, customers with investible assets of up to roughly 1 million dollars, a segment Lim argues is underserved between mainstream retail banking and private banking.

The scale of the ambition is significant: iFAST has set a target of more than 25 percent compound annual asset growth to reach S$100 billion in assets under administration by 2030, up from around S$32.64 billion as of March 2026. The company's net profit more than doubled to S$67 million on a 49 percent jump in revenue to S$383 million in 2024, with 2025 net profit topping S$100 million on S$515 million in revenue. Growth is coming from several fronts simultaneously: iFAST received in-principle approval for a Malaysian payments licence in 2025 with services planned later this year; its UK digital bank partnered with Alipay in April, letting iGB customers pay through Ant International's e-wallet gateway across more than 150 million merchants in over 100 markets; and the company continues to expand its Hong Kong eMPF and Macau pension administration business, a steady, contracted revenue stream layered on top of its wealth platform. “Private banks serve customers from all over the world, but focus on high-net-worth individuals. We think the big opportunity is mass affluent customers,” said Lim, describing the scale of iFAST's ambition as “as big as we want to dream.”

Why it matters: iFAST's model, serving global customers from a small number of regulated financial hubs rather than building fully localised operations everywhere, offers a genuinely different playbook from the super-app strategies dominating much of Southeast Asian fintech. Its combination of a UK banking licence, established wealth distribution across Singapore, Hong Kong and Malaysia, and steady pension administration revenue gives it a diversified base most single-product fintechs lack. The risk, as the profile notes, is execution: iFAST is scaling wealth management, integrating a recently acquired bank, administering pension systems and expanding payments all at once, and the next phase will be judged on the reliability of its banking operations and its ability to convert asset growth into genuine operating leverage, not just on continued product announcements.

The Debia angle: iFAST's trajectory reflects a theme Debia sees clearly across Singapore and the wider region: the most durable fintech businesses are increasingly the ones that patiently assemble regulated capabilities, wealth distribution, banking, payments, pension administration, into one coherent ecosystem, rather than chasing a single breakout product. That sequencing, adding regulated functions one at a time on a proven foundation, is a credible long-term model precisely because each new capability reinforces the others. For merchants and partners building payment and financial infrastructure in Singapore and across ASEAN, iFAST is a useful reminder that the region rewards infrastructure builders who play a genuinely long game.

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.