Taurus integrated the Hedera stack — is tokenisation another string to the RTP bow?
Real-time payments (RTP) are booming. Recent estimates say in 2024, one in five of all payments globally was via RTP, expected to reach 27% by 2028.1 Good news – except that as RTPs surge, so the safeguards protecting this system and enabling its further growth need to expand. Recent developments suggest that tokenisation could become an important building-block in the continued expansion of global RTP infrastructure.
A chance at true finality…
Right now, not all RTP schemes achieve true settlement finality at the interbank level. A payment instruction might clear in seconds while the underlying interbank settlement — the actual movement of money backing it — happens on a separate, slower rail.
Deferred net settlement schemes, including the UK’s Faster Payments, give customers the appearance of finality (the money is in your account, and you can spend it), but the interbank settlement happens later, batched through Real-Time Gross Settlement (RGTS).
Tokenisation of assets provides atomic settlement, effectively closing that gap. With atomic settlement, the transfer of the asset and associated payment transfer happen as a single action. So, tokenisation delivers ‘true’ finality.
Tokenisation as a building block in the ever-growing RTP ecosystem.
Taurus provides technology to more than 40 banks that can all access the Hedera stack. Hedera is a public distributed ledger network operated by a governing council of global organisations, including Google, IBM, Deutsche Telekom, Standard Bank, and now Accenture and FedEx.
Kamal Youssefi, President of The Hashgraph Association, said:
“Utilizing one of the best governed enterprise grade public networks, and leveraging Taurus’s full range of industry leading capabilities, this partnership represents another major milestone in the institutional adoption of the Hedera network.”
We see this shift in other markets, too. The Clearing House (TCH) in the USA launched a new initiative, targeted to go live in the first half of 2027, enabling on-chain clearing and settlement of tokenised deposits between banks within established frameworks.
TCH already has the support of seventeen major banks including JPMorgan Chase and the Bank of America,2 but some details are yet to be finalised. Thus far, no blockchain vendor has been selected, and no rulebook defines when a tokenised transfer becomes irrevocable.
Risk mitigation, or amplification?
Scale cuts both ways. As RTP infrastructure surges, along with interconnection, stress moves at faster and more concentrated rates. The building blocks compound risk, as much as capability, and the payments industry should invest in simulation exercises to prepare for the use of tokenisation and RTP settlement at scale. We can look to The Clearing House and Taurus integrating Hedera as positive encouragement, but there is still a lot to be done to ensure parties can transact safely and to minimise the risk of system collapse.
Read more on tokenisation here.
1 ACI Worldwide, April 2024: “Prime Time for Real Time”: https://www.aciworldwide.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Prime-Time-2024-Executive-Summary-Infographic.pdf