Chainlink Powered a Cross-Border Settlement Between Visa, ANZ, and Fidelity

Visa, ANZ, Fidelity International, and ChinaAMC completed a cross-border settlement pilot under the Hong Kong Monetary Authority’s e-HKD Pilot Programme Phase 2, demonstrating that institutional cross-border fund purchases can settle in near real-time rather than the standard two-day cycle that has defined financial markets for decades.

What the Pilot Actually Did

The test had a specific and practical objective. Australia-based corporate investors purchased tokenized money market fund units from Hong Kong-based asset managers, Fidelity International and ChinaAMC, using a combination of e-HKD and tokenized deposits. The settlement that would normally take two business days through correspondent banking chains happened in near real-time by removing the intermediaries that create the delay.

That compression from T+2 to near-instant is not a technical curiosity. The two-day settlement cycle exists because traditional cross-border transactions require multiple correspondent banks to verify, clear, and settle each leg of a transaction sequentially. Each handoff takes time, carries counterparty risk, and costs money. Tokenized settlement on shared infrastructure collapses all of those sequential steps into a single near-simultaneous process.

The Infrastructure That Made It Work

Three distinct technology layers handled different parts of the transaction. Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol, known as CCIP, powered the cross-chain messaging and value transfer between ANZ’s private blockchain, called DASChain, and public networks including the Ethereum testnet. CCIP is the bridge that allowed a private institutional blockchain and a public network to communicate and transfer value without requiring either party to abandon their existing infrastructure.

Visa’s Tokenized Asset Platform provided the APIs for minting and transferring the digital currencies involved. Visa’s role here is not as a payment network in the traditional sense but as infrastructure provider for the tokenization layer, issuing and moving digital representations of currency that the settlement system could handle programmatically.

Chainlink’s Automated Compliance Engine enforced real-time regulatory and policy checks throughout the transaction while keeping sensitive identity data off-chain. That last detail matters for institutional adoption. Banks and asset managers operating under strict data sovereignty and privacy regulations cannot put client identity information on a public blockchain. The ACE architecture allows compliance checks to run in real-time without exposing the underlying data publicly.

The $1.5 Billion Number and What It Represents

The pilot highlighted that tokenized deposits and CBDCs at scale could save global banks an estimated $1.5 billion annually in costs associated with maintaining traditional correspondent banking nostro accounts. A nostro account is a bank’s account held at a foreign bank in that country’s currency, used to facilitate international transactions. Banks maintain networks of nostro accounts around the world, each requiring capital to be held idle as a liquidity buffer.

Tokenized settlement reduces the need for those pre-funded nostro buffers because transactions settle instantly rather than requiring capital to sit waiting for a two-day clearing cycle. $1.5 billion annually is a system-wide estimate, but the savings per institution at scale are meaningful enough to justify significant infrastructure investment.

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What the HKMA Does Next

Following Phase 2 results, the HKMA announced it will prioritize wholesale e-HKD applications for institutional use cases rather than retail deployment. Cross-border trade and tokenized asset settlement are the focus. The authority plans to establish token standards by mid-2026 to ensure interoperability across different digital asset and payment systems operating in Hong Kong.

That standards timeline is significant. Without common token standards, each institutional pilot remains an isolated proof of concept. With standards in place, the infrastructure built by Visa, ANZ, Chainlink, and the asset managers in this pilot becomes replicable across the broader Hong Kong financial system and interoperable with other jurisdictions building similar infrastructure.

This pilot did not happen in isolation. It is one of dozens of similar institutional tokenization experiments running simultaneously across Singapore, the EU, the UAE, and the United States. The race to tokenize money and capital markets covered in this week’s earlier reporting has a working demonstration in Hong Kong. Near-instant settlement is not theoretical anymore.

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