How Tokenized Deposits Can Improve Domestic B2B Payments

Dr. Ravi Chamria

August 3, 2026

Key Takeaways

Domestic payment rails are already fast and cheap in most developed markets. The issue is in the workflow around the payment, not in the transfer of funds itself.
Tokenized deposits carry payment instructions and value together, which removes much of the reconciliation and exception handling that sits between an approved invoice and a booked receipt of B2B domestic payments.
The strongest business case is in higher-value, condition-heavy payment flows such as milestone contracts and invoice-linked settlement.
Privacy, interoperability across banks, and integration with legacy core systems will determine whether a tokenized deposit product stays inside one bank or reaches the wider market.

Domestic B2B payments are already highly digital in many markets. ACH handles large volumes at low cost. Wire transfer systems provide final settlement for high-value payments. Instant payment networks can move funds at any hour and carry structured data.

But the payment is only one part of a business transaction. A buyer still has to validate the supplier, match the invoice with a purchase order, confirm delivery, get approvals, release the funds, and reconcile the payment in its ERP. The supplier has to identify the incoming payment and close the correct receivable. These steps often sit across different systems and teams.

Tokenized deposits can bring the payment and part of that business workflow onto the same programmable infrastructure. US domestic B2B payment flows alone exceed $35 trillion a year

Source: The Federal Reserve, B2B Payment Modernization Report

The opportunity is therefore larger than making a bank transfer faster. It is about reducing the work around the transfer.

Where Do Domestic B2B Payments Fall Short Today?

Domestic payment infrastructure has improved substantially. In the United States, ACH processed 35.2 billion payments worth $93 trillion in 2025, and it remains the backbone of US B2B payments because of its reach, low cost, and data richness. Real-time rails are growing too. RTP volume surpassed $1.3 trillion in 2025, and FedNow has connected more than 1,700 institutions. Instant payment systems have closed more of the speed gap. The RTP network, for example, supports final 24/7 settlement, commercial payments, supplier payments, and rich ISO 20022 messages.

This means tokenized deposits need a stronger business case than speed alone, as these rails move money adequately for most purposes. The problem is in the payment workflow.

The main pain points in domestic B2B flows are invoice reconciliation, fraud and validation checks, approval bottlenecks, and manual AP and AR processes.

That friction lands differently on each stakeholder:

Buyers carry the cost of manual accounts payable work, multi-step approvals, and exception handling when payments and invoices fail to match.
Suppliers wait longer to apply cash against open invoices, which inflates days sales outstanding and clouds their working capital picture.
Corporate treasurers work around batch windows and cut-off times, and they hold extra buffers because they cannot see or move cash in real time.
Banks absorb reconciliation and exception-handling costs, and they face the risk that corporate balances migrate to competitors or non-bank tokenized instruments offering better tooling.

None of these problems is a settlement-speed problem. A payment that arrives in seconds but still needs a human to match it against an invoice has not removed the expensive part of the process.

What Do Tokenized Deposits Bring to Domestic B2B Payments?

A tokenized deposit is a DLT-based form of commercial bank money. It remains a liability of the issuing bank, can be interest-bearing, and sits within the existing deposit regulatory perimeter. On the bank’s balance sheet, issuing a tokenized version of the deposit is a reclassification of an existing deposit only. No new liability is created, and an institutional operating deposit keeps its Basel 25% LCR runoff and 50% NSFR available stable funding treatment provided the operating-relationship character is the same.

Credit: Tempo Research, Tokenized Money for Banks

For domestic B2B specifically, the value of tokenizing deposits comes from combining payment and business logic in one instrument. Tokenized deposits support milestone-based release, invoice-linked settlement, approval-based triggers, and conditional execution. A payment can carry its own release conditions, so the checks that today happen in email threads and ERP queues will be handled by the smart contract before funds move.

They also remove structural timing constraints. Tokenized deposits eliminate batch processing windows and cut-off times, run 24/7, and give treasurers unified real-time visibility over balances.

The market opportunity is large even at modest penetration. With US domestic B2B volumes above $35 trillion annually, a 1 to 3% shift to tokenized rails would imply $1 to $5 trillion in tokenized payment flows. For banks, this is partly a defensive move to protect transaction banking revenues and corporate deposits, and partly a chance to deepen client relationships.

How Does a Domestic B2B Payment Work With Tokenized Deposits?

Let’s take an example. Suppose a manufacturer orders custom equipment from a domestic supplier, with 40% due on order confirmation and 60% due on delivery.

With tokenized deposits, the flow could work as follows.

The manufacturer’s treasury converts part of its operating deposit into tokenized deposits. The bank mints tokens into the customer’s wallet using its private tokenized deposit ledger against that deposit balance,
A smart contract locks the full payment amount against the purchase order, with release conditions tied to the two milestones.
When the order is confirmed in both parties’ ERP systems, the contract releases the first tranche to the supplier’s wallet automatically. The tokens transfer between two KYC-verified wallets on the network where transferability is restricted to permitted counterparties.
When the delivery confirmation posts, the second tranche is released. Each transfer carries the invoice reference, so the supplier’s AR system applies the cash against the open invoice without manual matching.
The supplier can hold the balance in tokenized form for its own supplier payments or redeem it into a conventional deposit when needed.

If both companies bank with the same institution, the transaction can settle entirely on that bank’s ledger. If they use different banks, the sender’s token must be accepted, redeemed, or converted into the recipient bank’s token. The banks must also settle their resulting positions, normally through an agreed interbank or central bank settlement arrangement.

Compare that to today’s version of the same transaction. The buyer’s AP team processes the invoice, routes it through approvals, initiates an ACH payment before the daily cut-off, and the supplier’s AR team later matches an incoming credit against open invoices using remittance data that may arrive separately or not at all. The tokenized version collapses approval, payment, and reconciliation into a single conditional flow.

What Architecture Is Needed for Domestic B2B Payments?

There are three ledger architecture models that can be used for this use case.

Model	How it works	Best fit	Main limitation
Single-bank ledger	The buyer and supplier hold tokenized deposits issued by the same bank. The transfer changes ownership of one bank’s liability.	Early production use cases and closed corporate ecosystems	Both parties must use the issuing bank or an approved network participant.
Shared multi-bank ledger	Several banks issue tokenized deposits on a common governed network. Rules coordinate transfers, clearing, and settlement among issuers.	Broad domestic commercial payments	Banks must agree on identity, token standards, governance, liquidity, and finality.
Connected bank ledgers	Each bank keeps its own tokenized deposit ledger. An interoperability or orchestration layer coordinates payment across the ledgers and the interbank settlement system.	Markets where banks require greater infrastructure control	Cross-ledger atomicity, failure handling, and consistent transaction state are harder to guarantee.

Whichever model a bank selects, the production stack needs six connected layers.

Corporate systems. ERP, TMS, accounts payable, accounts receivable, procurement, and marketplace applications initiate payments and receive status updates.
Identity and policy controls. The bank verifies companies, users, wallets, roles, limits, and permitted counterparties before they can hold or transfer the deposit.
Integration and event services. APIs connect the bank to corporate systems and trusted business events. Every instruction needs idempotency controls so a repeated message cannot create a duplicate payment.
Tokenized deposit and smart contract layer. This layer records balances, transfers, conditional payment logic, token creation and destruction, and the authoritative settlement state.
Core banking and reconciliation. The token ledger must remain synchronized with the bank’s core deposit records, general ledger, liquidity systems, and regulatory reporting. A token cannot create an unrecorded or duplicate bank liability.
Interbank settlement and interoperability. A multi-bank design needs rules for par convertibility, token redemption, clearing, central bank settlement, and failures between networks.

These factors are in-depth covered in our previous article on:

Privacy must be designed across these layers. Payment amounts, supplier relationships, invoice timing, and working-capital patterns are commercially sensitive. Access-controlled ledgers, encrypted data, selective disclosure, and separate regulator views can keep transaction details available only to authorized parties. Tokenization at Investment Banks SODA Survey 2026 echoes the same concern around privacy,

“Privacy and confidentiality engineering, from permissioning to selective disclosure, is essential for institutional adoption, but it is still a precondition rather than a value proposition. And the broad “tokenize everything” narrative risks obscuring the narrow reality that banks care most where tokenization touches funding cost, liquidity usage, collateral velocity, settlement risk, operational efficiency, capital treatment, client revenue, or market share.”

The Zeeve privacy layer is built to solve exactly these issues. It’s a modular privacy middlewire that can be integrated with any custom blockchain or consortium ledgers. It takes a system-wide privacy approach and offers banks selective disclosure, role-based access control, private smart contracts, confidential transactions, and much more that simple permissioned networks or network-level privacy can’t provide.

Which Implementations Exist Today?

The clearest production system is Kinexys by J.P. Morgan. Its deposit token traces back to JPM Coin in 2019, and the platform now processes more than $5 billion per day. Citi Bank also launched Citi Token Services for internal liquidity management in 2023.

On the multi-bank side, Partior operates live for real-time settlement of tokenized deposits across institutions, with pre-validation and atomic settlement to reduce breaks and investigations. In June 2026, a group of large US banks including JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, and Wells Fargo plans a new network (TCH) to clear tokenized deposits, a direct move toward interbank domestic use.

Swift is building an EVM-compatible shared ledger to orchestrate transaction workflows across its member banks, having completed the design phase in March 2026.

All these pioneer implementations were covered in brief in our previous articles on other overlapping use cases and the previous two ledger architecture articles.

Read More:

What we can conclude from all these examples is that adoption today still concentrates on single-bank environments or tightly governed networks. The consortium efforts from global and regional banks are what would change that.

Zeeve for Privacy-Enabled Blockchain Infrastructure for Tokenized Deposits

Zeeve provides institutional-grade, privacy-enabled blockchain infrastructure for tokenized deposit deployments. That includes the Zeeve Privacy Layer, ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type II compliant infrastructure and operations, and Bring Your Own Cloud deployment for institutions with strict data residency and control requirements. Zeeve also supports migration from legacy blockchain infrastructure where an earlier pilot needs to move into production.

Zeeve, as a partner of Cosmos Labs and LF Decentralized Trust, brings in the expertise required for Cosmos CTS and IBC implementation, as well as Hyperledger Besu-like permissioned blockchain setups.

We have helped a big US bank with their tokenization initiative. Talk to our experts to discuss your tokenized deposit infrastructure!

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