Wells Fargo will begin offering tokenised deposits to corporate clients this autumn, initially enabling US dollar-to-pound transfers around the clock while keeping the service within the regulated banking system.
The first phase will cover a limited US dollar-to-pound corridor. Wells Fargo plans to expand the service to more customers, countries and currencies in 2027.
Tokenised deposits will allow commercial clients to move money between accounts and across borders without being restricted by normal banking hours. The service is expected to operate during weekends and public holidays as well as on working days.
“Tokenized deposits will enable Wells Fargo’s corporate and commercial clients to move money between accounts and across borders with greater ease and increased speed,” Chief Financial Officer Mike Santomassimo said in the official statement.
The bank will add the technology to its existing payments platform. Where it can improve the speed, timing or flexibility of a transaction, eligible payments will automatically be processed using tokenised deposits.
Wells Fargo also intends to introduce programmable payments. These will allow funds to be released automatically when conditions agreed in advance have been met, potentially giving businesses greater control over the timing of transfers.
Despite being recorded on blockchain infrastructure, the deposits will remain liabilities of Wells Fargo. They will also retain the regulatory protections and eligibility for deposit insurance associated with the bank’s conventional deposit products.
The launch has attracted support from blockchain infrastructure specialists. Magmar, co-CEO of Cosmos Labs, said Wells Fargo’s blockchain had been built using Cosmos technology and described the project as a validation of the network’s “interoperability, programmability, and reliability.”
Vladimir Tikhomirov, co-founder of Algebra, said the initial dollar-pound service represented an important step for blockchain technology in regulated foreign exchange and cross-border settlement.
“If this adoption curve continues, it’s reasonable to expect that within the next few years tokenized real-world assets will become part of everyday financial activity.”
However, Tikhomirov warned that interoperability could become a significant problem if banks create separate networks that cannot work easily with one another. Such an approach, he said, could fragment liquidity across isolated systems.
There has also been criticism of the need to use blockchain for the service. Omid Malekan, an adjunct professor at Columbia Business School, argued that banks already support real-time internal payments through modern databases and do not necessarily need permissioned blockchains.
“Banks don’t need blockchain to do better banking, at all,” Malekan wrote.
He said private blockchain networks lacked several features that had made public blockchains valuable, including open validation, censorship resistance and settlement guarantees. Banks would still have to correct errors, stop illicit transactions and comply with regulatory instructions, he added.
Malekan also cautioned that private blockchain systems could create additional operational risks without providing the advantages associated with public networks.
Wells Fargo’s project will therefore be a test not only of faster payments, but also of whether bank-controlled blockchain networks can justify the extra complexity. Its rollout will help determine whether tokenised deposits become a genuinely new payments tool or simply a new interface built on familiar banking infrastructure.
Elsewhere in the payments sector, Mastercard has completed its acquisition of stablecoin payments company BVNK. The transaction adds on-chain settlement and wallet infrastructure to Mastercard’s global network.
