DBS survey finds 88% of large businesses are using or piloting tokenised money

Tokenised money has quietly moved from conference panel topic to corporate treasury tool. A new DBS survey found that 88% of businesses have either deployed or are piloting tokenised money use cases.

The respondents are not scrappy startups chasing a trend. They are large organisations, each pulling in more than $500 million in annual revenue, which makes the finding harder to dismiss as hype.

What the survey found

DBS polled 422 global business and finance leaders between June and July. The sample spanned 11 markets, including the US, UK, Australia, China and Germany.

Roughly two-thirds of respondents said their companies had gone beyond the testing stage. They reported either full deployment of tokenised money at scale or live use in selected locations.

The remaining adopters are still in pilot mode. So the 88% headline figure blends committed users with companies still kicking the tires.

Stablecoins topped the list of instruments, used by 63% of respondents. Tokenised deposits followed at 53%, with tokenised money market funds just behind at 52%.

Those numbers add up to well over 100%. That suggests many firms are not picking a single winner but running several forms of digital cash side by side.

The survey also pointed to what companies hope to gain. According to the research findings, 72% of respondents expect better auditability and traceability within two years, while 65% plan to optimise treasury liquidity as a primary benefit.

More than three-quarters of respondents reported adapting their operations to support new markets, according to the same findings.

Why DBS is talking about it

The data arrived alongside remarks from Lim Soon Chong, the group head of global transaction services at DBS. He framed the results as evidence of real value rather than experimentation for its own sake.

“Our interpretation is that there are significant benefits,” Lim said.

The mix of instruments also tells a story about trust. Stablecoins grew up in the crypto world, while tokenised deposits and money market funds come wrapped in traditional banking and asset management structures.

What this means for banks, corporates and crypto

For the crypto market, the clearest signal is about stablecoins. When 63% of big companies surveyed report using them, stablecoins start to look less like a trading tool and more like corporate infrastructure.

For banks, the results cut both ways. Tokenised deposits at 53% show that lenders can compete by putting their own balance sheets on-chain. The flip side is that every corporate dollar moving through a stablecoin is a dollar that may sit outside a bank’s deposit base.

There are caveats worth keeping in mind. The survey covers only large organisations with revenue above $500 million, so it says little about smaller firms that may lack the resources to experiment.

The figures also combine full deployment with pilots. A pilot can mean a single test transaction or a meaningful program, and the survey’s headline number does not distinguish between them.

And the data comes from a bank with a clear interest in the outcome. That does not make the findings wrong, but readers should treat it as a well-informed snapshot rather than a neutral census.