Half of banking professionals expect to adopt tokenized money within two years. Attention is now shifting away from first-mover advantage to a more practical question: who can build the ledger infrastructure needed to make different forms of money work together, seamlessly and at scale.
Insights from the American Banker webinar “Real-Time Unified Ledger for Traditional and Tokenized Banking“
We recently brought together payments leaders from South State Bank, Amazon Web Services, and Finzly for an American Banker webinar on one of the most consequential questions in banking right now: how do you move toward tokenized money without destabilizing what you’ve already built?
The room – a cross-section of banking professionals from large banks, regional players and community banks, revealed an industry caught between urgency and paralysis. Half of those surveyed expect to adopt tokenized money within 24 months. Yet 40% describe themselves as still exploratory. The gap between those two groups is not a difference in ambition. It is a difference in architecture.
- 50% expect to adopt tokenized money within 24 months
- 40% are still evaluating options and understanding the play
- 33% backing bank-led consortia as the most durable path
The silent cost of two systems that can’t talk to each other
At the heart of the problem is a structural mismatch that every bank attempting this transition eventually confronts. Legacy core systems think in accounts – static records, batch cycles, end-of-day closes. Blockchain and tokenized networks think in tokens – programmable, real-time, always on. These are not just different technologies. They are different mental models for what money is and how it moves.
Forcing a legacy core to speak the language of tokenized rails either destabilizes the core or throttles the new capability down to the speed of the slowest system. Banks that tried to paper over similar mismatches during the ISO 20022 transition, layering mappers on top of payment engines, are still managing the fragility that decision created.
Unlike ISO 20022 where banks layered mappers on top of payment engines and created fragility for years, banks are now trying to get the foundational architecture right from the start.
Arun Selvaraj, Senior Solutions Architect, Amazon Web Services
The answer that emerged from this webinar is not a new core. It is the layer in between: a real-time unified ledger that sits above the core, translates between account-based and token-based worlds, and runs continuously, 24 hours a day, every day of the year.
The real conflict isn’t legacy versus innovation. It’s architecture versus ambition.
Tara Edmonds, SVP Enterprise Payments & Strategy, South State Bank
What a virtual ledger actually does for a bank today
Before tokenization enters the picture at all, the real-time virtual ledger solves problems that banks have been working around for years. It does this by separating the account structure that lives on the core from the transaction activity that needs to happen at speed – creating a virtual layer where banks can run product logic, interest calculations, compliance reporting, and real-time posting without touching the core at all.
One master account on your core, tens of thousands of virtual sub-ledger accounts in the virtual ledger – without exploding your account structure or calling your core vendor.
Steven Tourison, Finzly
This architecture unlocks four product areas where banks can generate real returns right now, independent of any tokenization timeline:
IOLTA, Escrow and specialty accounts
Multiple virtual sub-accounts on a single master, each carrying its own specialty interest logic and compliance rules – without per-account core fees or bloat.
24/7 shadow core
Transactions keep posting through core maintenance windows and batch cycles. In a 24/7 environment, a bank that goes dark, even briefly, risks losing that customer permanently.
Fintech banking relationships
Programmatic account creation, real-time balance feeds, and webhook notifications — the API-first infrastructure that fintechs need to bank with you rather than around you.
Corporate virtual account management
Treasury structures embedded so deeply in client operations that switching banks becomes impractical.
Each of these is a margin-generating product in its own right. None of them requires tokenization to be live. But all of them run on the same infrastructure that tokenization will eventually use.
The stablecoin shortcut – and its hidden cost
In the early days of tokenized money, it’s easy to default to what feels familiar. In our webinar poll, 39% of banking professionals chose stablecoins – the fastest, most accessible path. But that instinct to move quickly can obscure the trade-offs.
Routing deposits through stablecoin reserves shifts funding off the bank’s balance sheet, reducing control over liabilities and limiting flexibility in stress scenarios. It also introduces a structural dependency on reserve management outside the bank’s governance.
What looks like the simplest path upfront may ultimately come at a higher strategic cost.
The 33% backing bank-led consortia have reached a different conclusion: keep deposits on balance sheet, retain governance, and build the infrastructure to support tokenized money in-house. It is a harder path. It is also the more durable one.
Tokenized deposits are still bank money – the format is what changes
One of the most clarifying moments in the webinar came when the practitioners pushed back on a framing that has become common in discussions about digital assets: the idea that tokenized deposits represent a fundamental departure from banking as it has always worked. They do not. Tokenized deposits remain commercial bank money. They are balance sheet liabilities. They sit inside existing supervisory frameworks, carry the same compliance obligations, and are subject to the same risk management requirements as any other deposit product. What changes is the format in which that liability can move — and the speed at which it moves.
We view tokenized deposits as an evolution of deposits – not a departure from banking. They are still commercial bank money, bank balance sheet liabilities. What changes is the format and the speed at which that liability moves.
Tara Edmonds, South State Bank
This distinction matters enormously for how banks frame the internal conversation. It keeps the work anchored in banking fundamentals of risk and compliance, supervisory alignment, rather than in the language of experimentation. The task is not inventing a new form of money. It is building infrastructure that allows existing deposits to move in radically new ways.
One investment. Two paydays.
Here is the insight that should change how banks calculate the ROI on this decision. The infrastructure that supports IOLTA accounts, fintech partnerships, and corporate treasury structures today is the same infrastructure that will issue, track, and settle tokenized deposits tomorrow. These are not two separate bets. They are one investment that generates returns twice – once on the products it enables now, and again when tokenization becomes the standard format for how deposits move.
The banks stalled on architecture are not behind on ambition. They are simply waiting for clarity on where to start. The answer from this webinar is consistent: start with the ledger. Build the layer that connects the systems you have to the systems you will need. The products and the tokenization capability follow from there.
Planning your strategy for tokenized money and tokenized deposits? Connect with our experts to see how a real-time unified ledger can modernize your banking architecture and accelerate your growth.
