BNP Paribas, ABN AMRO Back European Deposit Token Initiative

Two major banks join: Last week, BNP Paribas joined the Commercial Bank Money Token (CBMT), an interbank tokenized deposit initiative launched by the German Banking Industry Committee (GBIC). With ABN AMRO joining only days before, the project has gained two major European banks in less than two weeks.

• Why it matters: European banks have spent much of the past months advancing stablecoin projects, through emerging consortia such as Qivalis and Bancomat as well as individual issuers. Tokenized deposits, by comparison, have attracted less attention. That may now be changing. Networks are taking shape globally, from The Clearing House and CARI Network in the U.S. to GBTD in the UK. With BNP Paribas and ABN AMRO joining, CBMT is beginning the same transition in the eurozone: from a German project into a network with broader European ambitions.

Expansion beyond Germany: Launched in 2021 and in a sandbox phase since 2025, CBMT now counts six banks: Commerzbank, DZ BANK, Helaba and UniCredit’s German subsidiary HypoVereinsbank from the original group, plus the two newcomers. Together they are building a network in which one bank’s tokenized deposit can be used at another.

How it works: CBMT puts those bank deposits onto a ledger shared across the network. A Siemens supplier banking with ABN AMRO could pay Siemens at Commerzbank on that ledger. ABN AMRO’s tokens would move across the network and Commerzbank would issue its own tokens to Siemens in return. The deposit remains a claim on the client’s own bank, just as it is today. What changes is the infrastructure underneath it: the money now sits on a shared record that software can act on.

• The limit: The banks themselves have not yet settled, though. Once Commerzbank issues its tokens to Siemens, it carries an exposure to ABN AMRO until the two settle in central bank money. The client payment can therefore be instant and programmable while interbank settlement remains separate. In between, banks can define how much exposure they accept, when positions are netted and when settlement is triggered.

Corporates first: That architecture makes more sense when looking at the other sandbox members: Siemens, Evonik, BASF, Bosch, Infineon and Mercedes-Benz. Industrial companies are digitizing production and treasury processes but want the payment leg to remain inside their existing banking relationships. For them, the immediate attraction is programmability.

• “As of today, one of the clearest use cases is payment automation, including support for models such as pay-per-use. For example, each time a component is delivered to a car manufacturer, the corresponding payment could be triggered automatically. A shared token standard would also make it possible to track transactions and data throughout the entire client-to-client payment flow, significantly improving reconciliation and compliance,” a person involved in the project told Blockstories.

The Siemens–Evonik test: That promise has already been put to work. In May, Siemens and Evonik, with DZ Bank and Commerzbank, ran a pay-per-use transaction inside the CBMT sandbox. Sensor data from a water-treatment process triggered the payment as part of the process itself, rather than after an invoice was issued.

A deposit, says BaFin: The experiment also ran on relatively clear legal ground. In December, BaFin classified CBMT balances as deposits under German banking law rather than e-money tokens under MiCA. According to information obtained by Blockstories, discussions for similar treatment are under way in France and the Netherlands. But without an EU-wide definition of a deposit, expansion means repeating that regulatory work jurisdiction by jurisdiction.

Waiting for the ECB: The full benefit arrives when the second half of the payment moves onto the ledger as well. If banks could settle in tokenized central bank money in the same step as Siemens receives its tokens, the gap would close: no exposure between banks, no weekend pre-funding. How soon this future arrives is in the ECB’s hands. Pontes, live from 21 September, lets a DLT transaction trigger settlement in TARGET, a bridge to today’s system rather than money on the ledger. Appia, which would put central bank money directly on the ledger, is not expected before 2028 at the earliest.

Six banks, then fifty: Even then, CBMT faces another scaling problem. Bilateral exposure management is workable between six banks. Between fifty, it becomes much harder. The network may eventually need either a clearing layer to coordinate positions centrally, bringing CBMT closer to the regulated infrastructure its members hoped to avoid, or a more decentralized model that supervisors would have to accept.

• “If there will be 50 banks joining, how will you do with them? That’s the question that we are facing right now,” the person close to the project said.