Canada’s Six Biggest Banks Move on Tokenized Deposits Days After OSFI’s Ruling

Twelve days after OSFI’s September 10 statement, six banks moved on tokenized deposits.

Canada’s six largest banks announced a joint Canadian-dollar tokenized deposit system 12 days after the banking regulator OSFI said tokenized deposits are not a separate asset class.

The Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions said in its September 10 statement that the underlying technology of a financial product does not determine its legal nature. A deposit recorded on distributed ledger technology is still a deposit. “Not legally distinct from traditional deposits” is how the regulator put it, adding that tokenized deposits would not be treated as a separate asset class.

The banks moved on September 22. Bank of Montreal, CIBC, National Bank of Canada, Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), Scotiabank and TD Bank Group said in a joint announcement that they will explore a shared Canadian-dollar tokenized deposit system to move money faster between financial institutions. The first phase focuses on transferring tokenized deposits across the six banks, with a longer-term goal of connecting to other digital asset initiatives and potentially opening to other Canadian deposit-taking institutions.

The sequence is what a reader of the announcement should weigh. Banks do not typically launch multi-institution projects of this kind without regulatory clarity, and the 12-day gap between OSFI’s guidance and the banks’ joint statement suggests the ruling functioned as a green light rather than a coincidence. That interpretation is analysis, not a bank or regulator statement, but the pattern fits: every systemically important Canadian bank joined at once; most tokenized deposit pilots elsewhere began with one or two institutions.

The project also fits the regulator’s own framing. Because tokenized deposits remain a liability of the issuing bank, insured and prudentially regulated, the initiative keeps programmable money inside the supervised deposit system rather than in stablecoins. Canada has built a parallel stablecoin regime separately: a Stablecoin Act enacted in March as part of Bill C-15 establishes a federal framework for fiat-backed stablecoins, expected to take effect in 2027.

The project has not named the technology: no ledger or platform has been identified, and no timeline for the interbank phase has been given. The banks have not committed to issuing a tokenized deposit, and the announcement says more banks may join later.