Corporate Treasury Tokenization: Reimagining Liquidity, Settlement, and the Future of Corporate Treasury

Corporate treasury tokenization, explained

Tokenization is the process of representing cash, deposits, securities, and collateral as programmable digital tokens on a blockchain. It lets treasury settlement happen in near real time rather than the two to three days typical of correspondent banking, while reducing reconciliation effort and freeing up trapped liquidity.

This whitepaper, developed by Standard Chartered and Zanders, explains what tokenization means for corporate treasury. It covers the four core categories of digital assets relevant to treasury, regulated stablecoins, tokenized deposits, tokenized securities, and CBDCs, and how they differ in liquidity impact and regulatory oversight. The tokenized money market fund sector has grown to roughly $13 billion, and a 37-bank European consortium is building a MiCA-compliant euro stablecoin for 2026. This signals fast adoption and the urgency for treasury teams to understand the shift underway.

What you will learn in this whitepaper:

• Why stablecoins and tokenized deposits have opposite effects on liquidity.
• How treasury’s role shifts from executing transactions to orchestrating liquidity, and what that means for governance and custody.
• Why most organizations should expect a hybrid model, traditional and tokenized infrastructure side by side, rather than a wholesale replacement.
• A five-step blueprint for identifying where tokenization solves a real treasury problem.