First Abu Dhabi Bank, the UAE-headquartered lender, has completed a live dollar-denominated tokenised deposit transaction with Citi using Swift’s new blockchain-based Ledger platform. It becomes the first bank in the Middle East or Africa to reach that stage of Swift’s global pilot.

The transaction moved a tokenised deposit between the two banks with Swift Ledger coordinating the transfer, while final settlement continued to run through existing correspondent banking channels rather than the ledger itself. The pilot’s cohort spans six continents, giving the milestone relevance well beyond the Gulf: Lloyds represents the UK, BNP Paribas the eurozone, UBS Switzerland, and DBS and OCBC Singapore, inside the same programme FAB has now moved ahead in.

Swift launched the Swift Ledger platform on 10 July 2026 to address a fragmentation problem building across the industry, Trade Treasury Payments reported: as more banks issue their own tokenised deposits on their own systems, without a shared coordination layer those tokenised-money networks risk becoming isolated from one another rather than interoperable. “With our new ledger capability, we’re extending the trust and stability of established finance into the frontiers of digital money,” Thierry Chilosi, Swift’s chief business officer, said at the platform’s launch.

What the transaction actually involved on tokenised deposit ledger

Tokenised deposits stayed on FAB and Citi’s respective balance sheets throughout. Swift Ledger coordinated the payment commitment and recorded the resulting interbank obligation without holding the underlying funds itself. Settlement between the two banks proceeded through the correspondent banking infrastructure already in place before this pilot began.

That distinction matters for how the milestone should be read. This is not a new settlement rail replacing correspondent banking, and it is not FAB moving deposits onto a public blockchain. It is a coordination layer sitting alongside the existing system, built to let banks match tokenised-deposit commitments against each other faster, including outside standard banking hours.

FAB’s participation places it inside a pilot cohort of 17 banks spanning six continents: ANZ, BNP Paribas, BNY, Citi, DBS, FAB, FirstRand, HSBC, Itaú Unibanco, Lloyds, Mashreq, MUFG, OCBC, Standard Chartered, UBS, UOB and Wells Fargo, according to Trade Treasury Payments’ reporting on the pilot roster. Mashreq is the only other UAE-headquartered bank in that group, though this particular live-transaction milestone belongs to FAB alone among the pilot’s Middle East and Africa participants.

Part of a broader pattern for FAB

FAB’s move into tokenisation did not start with this transaction. The bank issued a $100 million digitally native bond through HSBC’s Orion platform in 2025, reported by CoinDesk at the time as the Middle East and North Africa region’s first digital bond, and has continued building out a dedicated Global Treasury Trade and Tokenisation function since.

FAB has also digitised two consumer lending products in 2026: National Housing Loan joint accounts in January and a paperless, FAHR-linked personal loan application process in August. That puts institutional settlement infrastructure and retail lending on parallel modernisation tracks within the same bank, in the same year.

Neither FAB, Citi nor Swift has disclosed a transaction value for the completed deal, a timeline for moving beyond pilot status, or named an executive specifically responsible for it. Swift has said later phases of Ledger will focus on expanded interoperability, 24/7 cross-border settlement and programmable treasury tools for institutional and corporate clients, none of which is live yet, per the same Trade Treasury Payments report.