Ripple Seals Deal With Southeast Asia’s Largest Bank
Ripple has inked a three-way settlement with DBS and Franklin Templeton to deliver tokenized cash market funds and stablecoin-based liquidity onto DBS Digital Exchange (DDEx), in a transfer that squarely targets institutional demand for on-chain yield and credit score.
Biggest Bank In Southeast Asia Taps Ripple Tech
Under a memorandum of understanding signed on September 18, DDEx will record Franklin Templeton’s sgBENJI—the token of the Franklin Onchain US Dollar Short-Term Money Market Fund—alongside Ripple’s US greenback stablecoin, RLUSD, enabling eligible purchasers to swap between a yield-bearing fund token and a steady unit of account across the clock. Ripple says the answer is being constructed on the general public XRP Ledger, with repo-style lending to comply with because the initiative expands.
DBS, Southeast Asia’s largest financial institution by belongings (over $500 billion as of 2025), framed the tie-up as a part of a broader institutional shift towards tokenized market infrastructure. “Digital asset buyers want options that may meet the distinctive calls for of a borderless 24/7 asset class,” mentioned Lim Wee Kian, CEO of DBS Digital Exchange. The financial institution added that, in a subsequent part, it’ll discover permitting purchasers to submit sgBENJI as collateral to acquire credit score both immediately from DBS through repurchase transactions (repos) or from third-party platforms the place DBS acts as collateral agent—formally pulling a core money-markets use case on-chain.
Franklin Templeton, which has been on the vanguard of tokenized funds, will concern sgBENJI on the XRP Ledger to extend interoperability throughout networks. Roger Bayston, head of digital belongings at Franklin Templeton, referred to as the collaboration “a significant development within the utility of tokenized securities” and “a major step ahead within the progress of Asia’s digital asset ecosystem.” Ripple’s VP and world head of buying and selling and markets, Nigel Khakoo, underscored the capital-markets angle, saying the link-up to “allow repo trades for a tokenized cash market fund” with a regulated, liquid change medium like RLUSD “is actually a game-changer.”
Monica Long, Ripple’s president, situated the announcement within the bigger tokenization debate, arguing that real-world belongings should have each tradability and sensible makes use of to satisfy their promise. “In order for tokenized financial assets to unravel the issues they’ve been promised to unravel, we want each 1/ liquid secondary markets and a pair of/ utility for these belongings (similar to with collateralization). That’s precisely what Ripple, DBS and FTI are working in the direction of with this announcement,” she wrote through X.
The mechanics are designed for institutional portfolio administration. By itemizing sgBENJI and RLUSD aspect by aspect, accredited buyers on DDEx can shortly rebalance from unstable crypto exposures into a relatively steady, yield-accruing fund token with out leaving a single, bank-supervised ecosystem. Ripple and DBS say settlement finality inside minutes and 24/7 market entry are central to the design, with the XRP Ledger chosen for velocity, low charges and throughput appropriate for high-volume fund token transfers.
The alternative of DBS as venue is notable on scale alone. The Singaporean lender is persistently cited as Southeast Asia’s largest financial institution by belongings, and has been aggressive in constructing out regulated digital-asset rails by way of DDEx and bespoke custody. Ripple, for its half, has spent the previous yr positioning RLUSD as a compliance-first stablecoin for institutional funds and market operations, whereas Franklin Templeton continues to port money-market devices onto public ledgers in pursuit of programmable liquidity.
At press time, XRP traded at $3.10.
