Malaysia’s largest lender Maybank has successfully completed the first transaction under its inaugural pilot project for tokenized deposits and cross-border payments with Yinson Holdings Berhad, a Malaysia-based energy infrastructure company.

This marks a significant milestone in the bank’s digital innovation journey, and advances its mission of Humanizing Financial Services, the heart of its ROAR30 five-year strategy, the bank said in a statement on Monday.

The project integrates tokenization of bank deposits with an on-chain foreign exchange (FX) conversion of Malaysian Ringgit to Singapore Dollars, and a subsequent cross- border payment from Malaysia to Singapore, in near real-time, utilizing Maybank’s
permissioned blockchain.

The successful transaction demonstrates the technical feasibility of on-chain workflows and highlights its potential for incorporation into corporate treasury workflows to enhance operational efficiency and settlement speed.

“Our strategic focus on the MYR-SGD currency pair reflects the ambition to lead in facilitating seamless cross-border transactions, leveraging Maybank’s Malaysia-Singapore corridor advantage and position as an ASEAN gateway bank,

“We are pushing ahead in our ROAR30 strategy to build a regional transaction and payments platform across ASEAN that delivers integrated client experiences, frictionless money movement, and liquidity optimization,” said Khairussaleh Ramli, President and Group Chief Executive Officer of Maybank.

According to him, since announcing their pioneering partnership with Yinson Holdings Berhad, the bank has received strong market interest to collaborate on further pilots.

“This is encouraging and with the next phase underway, we are exploring additional use cases and partnerships with clients across multiple segments,

“This includes tokenized Islamic finance for businesses from large corporates to SMEs (small and medium enterprises), retail and wealth client solutions,” he added.

Maybank invests $2.5B over the next five years in technology, data, and AI strategy