
Briefing
AMINA Bank and Crypto Finance Group, alongside banking partners, successfully piloted a DLT-based solution on Google Cloud Universal Ledger (GCUL) to achieve near-real-time, 24/7 settlement of fiat currency transactions between regulated institutions. This integration directly addresses the multi-day latency and high costs inherent in legacy cross-border payment systems by maintaining settlement on commercial bank money rails, thereby modernizing core financial infrastructure without disrupting existing regulatory frameworks. The pilot’s success establishes a foundational capability for a global, scalable payment architecture that quantifiably reduces settlement time from days to seconds.

Context
The prevailing operational challenge in global finance is the systemic inefficiency of correspondent banking and traditional payment infrastructures, which rely on sequential, batch-processed messaging and reconciliation. This legacy architecture introduces significant counterparty risk and locks up corporate capital for multiple days due to T+2 or longer settlement cycles, especially for cross-border and cross-currency transactions. The absence of a single, shared source of truth necessitates complex, costly reconciliation processes and restricts institutional transactions to standard business hours, preventing true 24/7 global market operations.

Analysis
The adoption fundamentally alters the enterprise’s treasury management and cross-border payments system by replacing fragmented, bilateral ledgers with a single, shared, and immutable DLT on the GCUL platform. This change enables atomic settlement, where the transfer of value and the update of the ledger occur simultaneously, eliminating the need for post-trade reconciliation and guaranteeing finality of payment. For the enterprise and its partners, this creates value by drastically improving capital efficiency, as collateral is not trapped in transit, and by providing a compliant framework for 24/7 transaction processing. Crypto Finance Group’s role as the Currency Operator ensures the DLT maintains the integrity of commercial bank money, positioning the technology as a compliant, wholesale settlement layer that plugs directly into existing banking systems.

Parameters
- Financial Institutions → AMINA Bank AG, Crypto Finance Group, other banking partners
- Technology Platform → Google Cloud Universal Ledger (GCUL)
- Use Case → Near-real-time, 24/7 fiat currency settlement
- Asset Class → Commercial Bank Money (Wholesale Fiat)
- Operational Role → Crypto Finance Group served as the Currency Operator

Outlook
This successful pilot establishes a new operational blueprint for wholesale financial settlement, setting a clear standard for competitors to follow in the migration from legacy SWIFT/ACH infrastructure to DLT. The next phase will involve scaling the platform to include a wider consortium of global banks and expanding the use case to tokenized assets, leveraging the same DLT rail for Delivery-versus-Payment (DvP) settlement. The second-order effect is the creation of a global, institutional-grade, 24/7 liquidity pool, forcing a systemic re-evaluation of current capital requirements and potentially leading to a significant compression of operational costs across the entire financial services vertical.

Verdict
This DLT integration of commercial bank money into a shared ledger proves that systemic payment modernization can be achieved compliantly within existing regulatory structures, unlocking immediate, measurable capital efficiency for global institutions.
