The SEC has added tokenisation to its high-risk examination priorities, while Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and HSBC accelerate efforts to make regulated digital money work across borders and in everyday payments.
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has put tokenisation on its fiscal 2027 examination agenda, marking it as a high-risk area for systemically important clearing agencies just as Asian regulators and banks are moving more aggressively to build digital money infrastructure. In its priorities published on 23 October, the SEC said examinations of critical market plumbing would focus on defaults, recovery and wind-down planning, securities lending, operations and tokenisation, adding the topic to a list that also includes quantum computing and longer trading hours. The agency did not spell out why tokenisation sits in the high-risk category, but its earlier staff statement on tokenised securities pointed to possible legal, counterparty and operational dangers, including questions over ownership rights and the risk that on-chain records may not match off-chain records.
While Washington is approaching the sector cautiously, Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand are trying to shape the framework for cross-border digital money. The Monetary Authority of Singapore said on the same day that Bank Negara Malaysia and the Bank of Thailand had joined its BLOOM initiative as policymaker members. BLOOM, short for Borderless, Liquid, Open, Online, Multi-currency, is a public-private effort designed to bring together regulators, banks, payment networks and technology providers to develop common approaches for how digital money can be accepted, exchanged and settled across jurisdictions. According to the central banks, the work will concentrate on acceptance and settlement, interoperability between different digital money arrangements and programmable controls such as identity verification, sanctions screening and transaction controls.
The broader aim is to make cross-border digital payments more practical without sacrificing oversight, said Leong Sing Chiong, deputy managing director of markets and development at the Monetary Authority of Singapore. He said the future of finance will involve multiple forms of digital money operating across institutions and markets, and that collaboration would be needed to tackle settlement and interoperability. The Bank of Thailand said it welcomed the chance to help shape forward-looking rules for tokenised money, particularly in cross-border payments and wholesale settlement, while Bank Negara Malaysia said faster, lower-friction payments using multiple digital monies could become a real possibility rather than a distant idea.
At street level, HSBC has offered a glimpse of what this shift may look like for consumers in Hong Kong. The bank launched RedCoin, a Hong Kong dollar stablecoin, on its PayMe app on 23 October, saying more than 3.3 million users can now activate a wallet in the platform to send the token to friends, family and merchants. HSBC said the stablecoin is licensed and regulated by the Hong Kong Monetary Authority and is meant for everyday payments, with plans to extend functionality later this year to its mobile banking app and to tokenised investment products. The bank’s broader push into digital assets already includes blockchain-based bond issuance and a gold token, underscoring how regulated tokenisation is moving from pilot projects towards live products even as U.S. regulators continue to stress the risks.
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