What happened
- Specific facts/numbers: Six Canadian banks said on September 22, 2026 that they are jointly exploring Canadian-dollar digital money, starting with a tokenized-deposits initiative focused first on transfers across participating banks.
- Institutions involved: The participants named are Bank of Montreal, CIBC, National Bank of Canada, RBC, Scotiabank and TD Bank Group.
- Regulatory/technical context: The initiative centers on tokenized deposits, meaning bank deposit claims represented on distributed-ledger infrastructure for interbank payments and related digital-asset use cases.
- What to watch next: Watch for pilot details, additional deposit-taking institutions joining, and any clarification from Canadian authorities or payments infrastructure bodies on integration and oversight; no firm next milestone was identified.
Why it matters
If Canada’s largest banks can move tokenized deposits between institutions, it could create a regulated on-chain alternative to stablecoins for wholesale payment use cases.
HKMA Relevance
Direct: This is a foreign commercial-bank initiative, but it is relevant to Hong Kong because banks and regulators there are also evaluating tokenized money models for payments and settlement.