RBC, TD, BMO, Scotiabank, CIBC, and National Bank announced Tuesday a joint plan to build shared Canadian-dollar tokenized deposit infrastructure, starting with transfers between the banks themselves.

The project is separate from the Bank of Canada's shelved digital-dollar consultation, in which 85% of nearly 90,000 respondents said they would not use a hypothetical digital Canadian dollar.

Scotiabank and TD are also among 21 banks building a joint U.S. dollar stablecoin, while BMO already operates a tokenized cash platform with CME Group and Google Cloud.

Shared plumbing for digital money

Canada's six biggest banks have agreed to build shared infrastructure for digital money. Per the joint announcement, they will jointly explore a Canadian-dollar tokenized deposit system, with the first focused on moving deposits between the banks themselves rather than into consumer wallets. Because the participants are the country's six largest banks, the effort amounts to shared market plumbing rather than any single institution's proprietary experiment.

A tokenized deposit is a regular bank deposit represented as a digital token on a shared ledger—same money, same bank, same rules, just running on a different network. It is not a new cryptocurrency, and it is not a central bank digital currency (CBDC) either—the tokens stay inside the regulated deposit system the banks already operate in.

In their joint statement, the banks said they want the system to be “competitive and secure” while keeping the safeguards that already govern commercial bank money. They also want to leave the door open for other Canadian deposit-taking institutions to eventually join.

Faster, around-the-clock settlement

Moving money between banks in Canada today can be slow to clear outside a basic e-transfer. A shared token system would, in theory, let banks settle those transfers instantly and around the clock, with payments that can be programmed to trigger automatically—for example, releasing funds the moment a shipment clears customs.

For the banks, the appeal is timing: funds in transit between institutions sit in limbo until they land on the other side, and a ledger the six share aims to shrink that in-between window to nearly nothing.

Customers likely would not see any of this directly. It would run in the background, much like the wiring behind an ACH transfer today.

Separate from the digital Canadian dollar debate

The initiative differs from Canada's actual digital-dollar discussion. The Bank of Canada ran a public consultation on a possible digital Canadian dollar in 2023 that drew almost 90,000 responses. Eighty-five percent of respondents said they would not use a hypothetical digital Canadian dollar, and many placed a high value on privacy and continued access to cash.

That skepticism was aimed at central-bank-issued money. Tokenized deposits sit on the other side of the line: they remain commercial banks' own deposits in digital form, a different instrument from anything the Bank of Canada would issue.

Canada has tried digital cash before and shelved it. The Royal Canadian Mint sold off its MintChip digital-cash pilot in 2016, and the app built on it shut down for good in 2018.

Parallel efforts in the United States

In the United States, JPMorgan, Citi, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo are building a rival tokenized deposit network through The Clearing House—the bank-owned real-time payments operator—targeting a first-half 2027 launch, largely to keep stablecoins from siphoning off deposits. Thirty-nine U.S. state banking associations have their own version too, the BankChain Alliance, aimed at community and regional lenders.

Canada's Scotiabank and TD are named among the 21 banks backing a separate joint U.S. dollar stablecoin, also targeting the first half of 2027—meaning the same institutions are betting on tokenized deposits and stablecoins at once.

BMO, meanwhile, went live this year as the first bank on CME Group's tokenized cash platform on Google Cloud, letting institutional clients move U.S. dollars around the clock for margin and collateral.

What comes next

The six Canadian banks have not set a launch date. The first phase stays limited to transfers between the participating institutions, with opening the system to other deposit-taking players still a stated goal rather than a commitment. What to watch from here: whether the interbank phase works as intended, whether more Canadian deposit-takers formally sign on, and whether the banks eventually attach a date—against U.S. counterparts already pointing at the first half of 2027.