Tokenisation has genuine momentum behind it. Asset management firm, ARK Invest, projects the tokenised asset market could reach $11 trillion by 2030. And while sovereign debt leads today’s, ARK expects bank deposits and public equities to make up a much bigger share of it by 2030. Moreover, according to Cornerstone Advisors’ 2026 research, 57% of banks have already discussed tokenised deposits at board or executive level. This isn’t a fringe experiment anymore; it’s firmly on the agenda.
But ask those same banks whether their infrastructure is actually ready for tokenisation and the picture changes. Our own research found that over half (51%) of banking IT leaders link rising operational costs directly to inefficiencies in payment processing. Only 13% report full automation across core payment functions, and 65% spend more time repairing payment data than producing it. So, while the appetite for tokenisation is real, there are questions to be asked as to whether the plumbing underneath it can keep pace.
Tokenised payments don’t live in a vacuum – and herein lies the problem
A tokenised payment doesn’t stay tokenised for its whole journey. At some point, it has to talk to Swift, to BACS, to a core system that was often built in a time when settlement took days and nobody expected much to change year to year. Those systems weren’t built to handle the structured data a digital rail produces, so the richness gets stripped out, and the payment ends up fragmented, manually reconciled, or delayed anyway. The result is a fast rail bolted to a slow bank. The speed gained on one end gets lost the moment a human has to check, repair or reconcile it by hand on the other.
Fix visibility before you fix everything else
The instinct, faced with this challenge, is to think in terms of a big transformation programme. But it doesn’t necessarily have to be that way. You can start smaller by focusing on the visibility challenge first.
Most banks can’t actually see their own payments end-to-end. A transaction can pass through six or seven systems that don’t report into one place, so nobody has a live picture of what’s failing or where. But you can’t fix, let alone automate, a problem you can’t see.
So, this is a good place to start. By adding a layer that brings payment status, screening and exceptions together across the systems already in place, then automating the failures that show up most often, you can lay a solid foundation well before tokenisation pilots become live conditions.
How Aqua Global can help
This is exactly the gap Aquila is built to close. Not by replacing a bank’s core, but by sitting alongside it to provide:
- Full visibility and auditability: Every payment tracked end-to-end across existing systems, so issues get caught before they become manual repair work
- Native ISO 20022 processing: Structured data handled natively, rather than translated and stripped, keeping the richness that tokenised rails already produce
- Unified orchestration: Fragmented payment processes brought into one consistent workflow, connecting old rails and new ones without a rip-and-replace project
- Seamless integration: Connects to core banking, screening and reconciliation systems via API, so the foundation gets built without the downtime banks understandably want to avoid
With this foundation in place, banks can confidently move across digital and traditional rails while keeping the core systems and controls they rely on intact. Our latest partnership with IntellectEU extends this capability, giving banks greater interoperability across the financial ecosystem as tokenised deposits continue to evolve.
Looking ahead
The next 18 months will separate the banks that have built strong data foundations from the ones still repairing payments by hand. And this gap will matter more than who announced a pilot first. If you want to know where your own infrastructure stands before that window closes, talk to us.
