finance

Banks clear major milestone toward real-time, cross-border tokenized deposits.

Tokenized deposits are a step closer to broader institutional use as HSBC Holdings PLC and Standard Chartered PLC completed the first bank-to-bank transaction via the banking messaging consortium SWIFT’s digital blockchain-backed ledger, the banks reported on Aug. 19.

“As institutional demand grows for faster, more efficient ways to move liquidity, and optimize working capital increase, interoperable tokenized deposits will play an increasingly important role in helping corporate and institutional clients manage treasury, unlock operational efficiencies and support real time liquidity management across markets,” said Mark Willis, head of emerging payments, transactions services, and digital assets at Standard Chartered, in a prepared statement.

Interoperability remains one of the main barriers to tokenized deposit adoption.

The payment transaction sent by HSBC to Standard Chartered was recorded as a tokenized deposit obligation on HSBC’s Tokenised Deposit Service and Standard Chartered’s tokenized-deposit infrastructure, while SWIFT’s blockchain platform acted as the orchestration and record-keeping layer.

“It demonstrates how digital money issued by banks can be interoperable across institutions while maintaining the integrity and regulatory oversight of the existing financial ecosystem,” Lewis Sun, head of digital currencies at HSBC, added in the statement.

The transaction comes six weeks after SWIFT made its digital ledger platform available for initial use. SWIFT officials said the ledger will gain additional functionality after its initial go-live phase.

Tokenized Deposits Benefits

Tokenized deposits differ from stablecoins by their backers and how they operate. Private institutions issue stablecoins backed by an audited reserve of highly liquid financial instruments. Tokenized deposits are digital representations of bank deposits issued by regulated financial institutions and act as direct claims on those institutions. Owners can also convert tokenized deposits back into fiat currency and restore account balances.

For corporate treasuries, tokenized deposits provide the benefits of digital money — faster settlement, programmable money, digital asset integration, and immutable transactions — while maintaining existing banking relationships and aligning with existing banking regulations.

Broader Industry Activity

HSBC and Standard Chartered’s initial transaction via the SWIFT digital ledger is only the latest of such announcements in the past several weeks. A day earlier, the Canton Network announced that tokenized deposits are live on its network with HSBC, Lloyds Bank PLC, and JPMorgan Chase & Co. in various stages of testing, TradingView reported.

In early June, U.S. payments rail operator The Clearing House, which is owned by 25 of the largest financial institutions, released plans to launch on-chain clearing and settlement of tokenized deposits within the established banking framework. 

A month later, the Cari Network announced a soon-to-launch pilot to support real-time settlement, liquidity management, and digital money movement. Unlike other initiatives backed by tier-1 institutions, Cari Network is designed by U.S. regional institutions First Horizon Corp., Huntington Bancshares Inc., KeyBank National Association,  M&T Bank Corp., Old National Bancorp, and SouthState Bank Corp.

The importance of these projects is less about how they achieve results and more about whether they can provide faster settlement, lower reconciliation costs, and real-time cash management. The next step will be whether these pilots develop into production-quality systems that can deliver interoperability and meet regulatory obligations across various jurisdictions.

Rob Daly covers fintech and the economy. Contact him at rdaly@gfmag.com. 

Import businesses have felt the impact as rerouted cargo vessels clog unprepared African ports, tying up inventory.

Asset-light corporations are becoming asset-heavier organizations as the on-again, off-again closure of the Strait of Hormuz continues to disrupt global supply chains.

During the 30 days preceding Aug. 17, an average of 16.9 ships passed through the Strait transporting 2.2 million barrels of crude and 380,000 barrels of petrochemicals, as reported by The Strait of Hormuz Ship Monitor. By comparison, during the first quarter of 2025, the U.S. Energy Information Administration estimated that 14.2 million barrels and 5.9 million barrels of petroleum products were shipped daily through the waterway — a decrease of approximately 84% and 94%, respectively.

According to the Atlas Institute for International Affairs, the Cape route is becoming the default option for vessels. As a result, import businesses have felt the impact as rerouted cargo vessels clog unprepared African ports, tying up inventory even longer.

Bolstering inventories and increasing liquidity buffers may initially have been a short-term response to the disruption, but industry insiders view the change as permanent.

“Just-in-time has become just-in-case, and that converted inventory is now on the CFO’s balance sheet,” John Stevens, senior vice president and global head of financial institutions and working capital at Kybira, told Global Finance. ”Higher [days inventory outstanding] stretches the cash conversion cycle and that cash has to come from somewhere: You borrow it or extend supplier terms.”

Adding Days

According to the authors of Allianz Trade’s Days Sales Outstanding (DSO) & Cash Collection Cycle (CCC) report, published in July, the disruption is expected to add a global average of two days to the CCC in the second half as its effects permeate supply chains.

The authors also expected that the U.S.-Iran conflict would result in a lighter version of the 2022 supply chain shock, little appearing in listed firms’ first-half financials and more tangible in the second half as the disruption permeates supply chains with a lag.

“Electronics, pharmaceuticals, textiles, automotive suppliers, metals and paper face the most direct pressure: already inventory-heavy and running elevated cycles, they have the least room to absorb a further DIO rise without tipping their financing needs into distress territory,” they wrote. “Construction and machinery & equipment carry the largest absolute cycles (approximately 103 days) and are unlikely to escape a broad inventory rebuild. Second, the shock should be partly offset by continued private-sector spending on AI infrastructure and data centers, which supports computers & telecoms and software & IT, keeping a meaningful share of the economy on a compressing or at worst flat trajectory.”

Inventory’s Cost

“Every day of DIO you add is cash pulled out of circulation, and that comes at a premium at current financing costs,” said Stevens. “CFOs should be pricing the free cash flow hits before any DIO build-up.”

Companies should count days and dollars rather than units, he added. “Any universal number, in either units or DIO, is a guess. Transit patterns through the Strait of Hormuz have been highly volatile, with flows falling sharply and recovery remaining uneven.”

There is light at the end of the tunnel — if a company’s balance sheet is large enough.

“Large, investment-grade buyers may be better placed to fund inventory builds, while their mid-market suppliers may not be,” said Stevens. “If payment terms are stretched to fund DIO extensions, the biggest squeeze can land one or two tiers down the value chain. Supply-chain finance can help address that gap when it is structured transparently and appropriately.”

Rob Daly covers fintech and the economy. Contact him at rdaly@gfmag.com. 

Deepening political, social, and cultural ties opens a fertile financial market.

Africa’s position as a corridor for capital, trade, and investment is capturing the attention of Middle Eastern banks.

For decades, the continent was a preserve of Western lenders. Today, most have exited due to stringent regulatory requirements in their home markets, leaving Africa’s homegrown banks to fill the void. But the dynamics are changing again as Gulf banks venture into Africa to exploit deepening ties cutting across political, socio-economic, cultural, and religious spheres.

The influx into Africa is striking. In August, Emirates NBD Bank PJSC made a statement of its determination to control the United Arab Emirates-Egypt corridor by acquiring HSBC Egypt’s retail business. Emirates NBD Group CEO Shayne Nelson called the acquisition an important milestone in the execution of the bank’s regional growth strategy. 

“The transaction strengthens our presence and supports our ambition to continue growing our customer franchise,” he said.

Emirates NBD, which boasted $317 billion in assets in 2025, is not the only Middle East bank that is bullish on Africa. First Abu Dhabi Bank PJSC (FAB), the biggest in the Middle East-North Africa region by assets at $382.2 billion with a presence in 20 markets including Egypt and Libya, announced earlier this year that it would open its first sub-Saharan representative office in Lagos, and in July said it would be applying for a banking license in South Africa.

Other lenders are strengthening their footing in Africa through targeted investments and collaborative ventures. Among them is Qatar National Bank QPSC (QNB), which controls a 20.1% stake in Ecobank, the leading pan-African bank with a presence in 35 markets. Ecobank posted a $423 million profit before tax in the first half of this year.

Bahrain’s Al Baraka, the UAE’s Mashreq Bank, and Dubai-based Soren Investment Co., which last year purchased a controlling stake of 42.8% in Kenya’s Gulf African Bank, to are also making forays into the continent.

Tighter Connections

The scramble by Gulf lenders is not a fluke. They see a market awash with opportunities cutting across Islamic banking, international payments, capital flows due to growing trade, foreign direct investment (FDI), and remittances and labor ties.

Bilateral trade between the Middle East and Africa stood most recently at $260 billion, while FDI exceeded $100 billion over the decade from 2012 to 2022. The Gulf Cooperation Council states are also a major source of remittances to Africa. Last year, these amounted to $28.3 billion, dwarfing the $1.1 billion the continent received from the GCC in development assistance.  

Another area of opportunity is Islamic finance, cutting across Shariah-compliant banking, bonds, insurance (Takaful), Islamic fintechs, among other businesses. While Africa is home to 600 million Muslims, its contribution to the global pool of Islamic financial services was just $30.7 billion in 2025, or a mere 0.7% of the global total of $4.4 trillion. Even in Senegal, where 94% of the population is Muslim, Islamic banking assets accounted for a mere 8.3% of total banking assets in 2024.

 “Islamic finance offers a compelling blueprint for strengthening regional financial resilience and economic integration,” said Suleiman Walhad, president of the Horn of Africa States research group.

John Njiraini is a contributing writer based in Kenya.

The central bank poured cold water on the claim that stablecoin can make cross-border remittances cheaper.

A new study from Italy’s central bank challenges one of the crypto industry’s biggest selling points: that stablecoins can make cross-border remittances cheaper and faster than traditional payment networks.

Banca d’Italia’s research examined remittance corridors involving Italy, Argentina, Brazil, South Africa, the United Arab Emirates, and Japan, comparing USDC transfers against established money transfer services. Its conclusion was sobering.

Stablecoin transfers showed no systematic cost advantage, with total costs ranging between 0.3% and nearly 9%, meaning digital-dollar transfers were sometimes more expensive than conventional remittance providers.

Payment industry veterans addressed the findings, highlighting a critical distinction often overlooked in discussions about digital money: the difference between low-cost blockchain settlement and the expensive legacy networks surrounding it.

Size Matters in Remittance Costs

“The [central bank’s] test was fundamentally flawed,” said Daniela Sozzi, founder of London-based fintech strategy firm DNYC.

Why? Because of the relatively small transaction size used by the study’s authors ($200). In an email to Global Finance, Sozzi explained that the use of stablecoins is economically advantageous only for sums of at least $100,000. These are still relatively small compared to “traditional” wholesale transactions using traditional correspondent banking services, such as $1 million and above, she pointed out.

“So, stablecoins are cheaper for certain types of transactions, not universally cheaper,” said Sozzi.

But that $200 threshold isn’t arbitrary — it’s the standard transaction size the World Bank uses to benchmark its Remittance Prices Worldwide index, which put the global average cost of sending money through traditional channels at 6.36% in the third quarter of 2025.

The index of major international money-transfer operators, such as Western Union, came in at 5.52% — squarely inside the 0.3% to 9% range the Italian central bank found for stablecoins, underscoring Sozzi’s point that at this size, the two systems are comparable.

Still, Banca d’Italia’s findings track with a broader body of research on stablecoin remittances. A BIS paper published in March scrutinized how cross-border payments, “particularly remittances and retail transactions, remain more costly, slower, less accessible, and less transparent than domestic payments.”

Where Are Costs Coming From?

Rather than viewing the report as a rejection of digital money, payment industry experts say the findings point to a broader structural issue: while settlement on the blockchain is fast and cheap, moving money into and out of legacy networks remains costly.

These expensive friction points stem from legacy bank networks, explained Alexander Taskey, CEO of global settlements platform Frame.

“Much of the cost around stablecoins comes from on- and off-ramping, since that requires moving in and out of legacy payments infrastructure,” Taskey wrote in an email to Global Finance.

London-based Frame operates as a programmable settlement layer, enabling financial institutions to orchestrate and route funds across both legacy banking rails and on-chain networks.

“Once funds are on blockchain rails, the cost of transacting collapses to near zero,” Taskey added.

‘Blockchain Cost Isn’t the Issue’

Pankaj Bengani, founder and CEO of payments infrastructure company Meld, said that the friction lies at the edges. “The cost on the blockchain is not the issue. Once the fiat — whether it’s euro or U.S. dollar — is on the blockchain, the costs are very, very low. All the cost is baked into the on- and off-ramps.”

Because of this, both executives agree that judging stablecoins solely on current consumer remittance pricing misses the broader trajectory of payment rails.

Bengani likens today’s stablecoin ecosystem to the early days of global container shipping, where efficiency gains only materialized after shipping ports and logistics networks matured. Similarly, Frame’s Taskey said that end-user priorities will ultimately drive how these backend systems evolve.

“Ultimately, customers don’t care which rails are being used,” Taskey added. “They simply want payments that are cheaper, faster, and more secure.”

While consumer remittances in developed corridors like Europe and the U.S. remain highly optimized via traditional rails, stablecoins are finding immediate traction where traditional systems fall short — such as high-fee corridors or markets with volatile local currencies where businesses and consumers prefer holding USD balances.

The Future Is Hybrid

Looking five years ahead, industry leaders see stablecoins operating not as a total replacement for traditional banking, but as one part of a larger, hybrid settlement architecture.

“Five years from now, I expect stablecoins to coexist alongside legacy fiat rails as one option among many,” said Taskey. “The challenge for banks will be tying it all together and consolidating fragmentation into a single, interoperable platform.”

For now, the Banca d’Italia’s findings serve as a reminder that while blockchain technology offers near-frictionless settlement, the global financial infrastructure built around it still has significant ground to cover.

Anthony Noto covers corporate finance and private credit. Contact him at anoto@gfmag.com.

How Luca Ferrari’s permanent-capital model is transforming distressed digital brands.

Is it a private equity group with a twist? An “emergency room for critically injured tech companies,” as it was described by the Financial Times? Or is it simply a modern tech conglomerate?

How do you categorize a company that buys aging technology and digital brands—brand names like AOL, Vimeo, Eventbrite, WeTransfer, and more recently, Airtable—far below their peak value, overhauls and radically transforms them with a drastic turnaround, and then keeps them under the same umbrella to invest their profits in new acquisitions?

What it is, is a buy-and-hold investment and management company.

Bending Spoons SpA, an Italian company created in 2013 and recently listed on the Nasdaq, raised $1.68 billion with a total valuation of $18.4 billion and a current market value of $23 billion, and marked a 40% pop on its trading debut. For the second quarter, it reported $704 million in revenue and $177 million in net income, up 126% and 171%, respectively, from the second quarter of 2025.

It follows a highly unusual business model: buying distressed tech companies—or tattered internet businesses—at relatively low valuations, fixing them up through layoffs and reorganization, and then holding them rather than spinning them off or selling them separately to the market, as private equity groups typically do.

Bending Spoons has executed this strategy some 50 times since its creation. Funding for its activities comes from debt and from the profits of the acquired companies: the same ones it bought at low valuations, with seemingly no competition to acquire the brand.

All this was achieved as revenues increased fourfold from $387 million in 2023 to $1.3 billion last year, during which period it made 70% of its acquisitions. Ownership’s financial goal is an annualized return of 25% on invested capital, built on operational earnings alone rather than divestments, synergies between different acquisitions, or headcount reductions.

Meanwhile, debt, which financed 70% of the acquisitions that Bending Spoons made in the first quarter of this year, continues to pile up. In the last reported quarter, total debt was more than four times annualized EBITDA: hovering, in other words, between $4.3 billion and $4.4 billion, with a net debt of nearly $3.7 billion. The Canadian company Constellation Software Inc. has a similar business model, but carries less debt on its books, while Barry Diller’s People Inc.—formerly IAC Inc.—has followed a similar business model.

Luca Ferrari, CEO and one of four co-founders of Bending Spoons, described the model as a “deep transformation” because the acquired brands do not just go through layoffs but undergo radical structural reconstruction. The company’s name, an homage to the movie The Matrix, reflects the founders’ belief that mindset can transform reality, fueling their goal to achieve milestones that others might deem impossible.

In the prospectus for its Nasdaq listing, Bending Spoons mentions 1,000 potential targets. Its latest acquisition, announced this month, is Airtable, a “collaborative work management” software company, for $1.29 billion in cash. That represents a nearly 90% discount over Airtable’s highest valuation in 2021.

“The thesis of what we do,” Ferrari said, “is to integrate these companies very deeply onto our platform and rebuild them almost from the ground up: the technology, the product, the monetization, and big parts of the team. If we don’t see that we can make a big difference, we don’t expect to be able to make an appealing offer.”

A ‘Permanent-Capital Operator In A Tech Wrapper‘

Bending Spoons is not really a tech company, said Chelsea Michelle, founder of Elevated Business Advisors, who advises founders and family offices on capital strategy and acquisitions: “It is a permanent-capital operator wearing a tech wrapper, and the refusal to sell is the most important line in the model.

“Traditional private equity must manage every acquisition toward an exit multiple, which means dressing assets up for the next buyer. When you never plan to sell, you can optimize purely for cash generation and ignore the story entirely. That is a structural advantage, not a stylistic one.

“The model works because aging digital brands are systematically mispriced; sellers value them on declining top-line while a buyer at Bending Spoons’ scale values durable user bases that cost almost nothing to serve. The real risk is not the buying; it is the integrating. Most acquisitions fail to deliver expected value, and a serial acquirer that holds everything forever has nowhere to hide a bad integration. The integration discipline, not their deal flow, is what investors should watch after the Nasdaq listing.”

In a recent article in Barron’s, Henry Ellenbogen, CIO and managing partner of Durable Capital Partners and an investor in Bending Spoons before the IPO, pointed out an interesting angle on the company’s performance.

“When we first invested, Bending Spoons was making under $500,000 of EBITDA per Spooner, or employee,” he wrote. “Today, EBITDA is more than $1 million per Spooner. That speaks to the investment the company is making in the technology businesses it buys.

“Bending Spoons is centralized. Evernote [a company it acquired in 2023] has fewer than 20 people at the application level. We believe Bending Spoons’ revenue and EBITDA per employee will continue to compound, allowing the company to drive better organic growth and strong operating leverage. The market’s concern about software companies should allow management to buy higher-quality companies that fit its model at attractive prices.”

Currently, only 9% of shares in the company are available for trading, and the owners control the rest with a dual-class share mechanism.

On Wall Street these days, Bending Spoons’ stock gets four hold recommendations from analysts, one overweight, and six buy, but most of the banks it works with were involved in the IPO. Job applications are also strong; 99.9% of the 800,000 applicants for jobs as Spooners—the people running the acquired companies—were rejected.

Beyond the optimism about the stock’s performance and the company’s unusual business model, the future of Bending Spoons is tied to its long-term performance rather than its short- and medium-term performance, and whether its business model can and will be replicated. Time will tell.

Andrea Fiano is the editor-at-large. Contact him at afiano@gfmag.com.