DLT is at the centre of a massive push for innovation across the financial services industry. Deloitte has been an active player in this emerging ecosystem, conducting research, exploring use cases, designing prototypes to test hypotheses and partnering with technology platform vendors to collaborate on pilots.

A group of banks in Singapore, with the support of the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), Singapore’s central bank and financial regulatory authority, have also been developing a payment system prototype using DLT in which bank users can exchange currency with one another without lengthy processing times, expensive processing fees, or intermediaries. R3 – a consortium specialising in DLT – has partnered with the group on the initiative, known as Project Ubin. This project represents a significant opportunity for Singapore’s ecosystem to establish leadership in the area of DLT research and development, in line with Singapore’s broader goal of becoming a Smart Financial Centre.

In this whitepaper, we provide a brief overview of DLT along with how Deloitte is pioneering innovation in the market, while outlining Project Ubin, which places a tokenized form of the Singapore Dollar (SGD) on a DLT. Singapore may be the first major financial centre in Asia to fully explore the benefits of DLT across a broad set of transformative applications.