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ACI Worldwide Inc. early Tuesday said banks will be able to process payments via tokenized deposits as well as traditional payment methods through its move to add Swift ledger transactions to its ACI Connetic payments hub. The international payments network Swift introduced its blockchain-based ledger last year.
The move comes as stablecoins and other digital-money trends are drawing attention to the payments potential offered by tokenized deposits, digital representations of commercial bank money entered on a blockchain or distributed ledger. Omaha, Neb.-based ACI, one of the country’s largest payments processors, introduced ACI Connetic last year. The platform combines card processing, account-to-account payments, and fraud prevention on one platform.
ACI says its latest move will let banks process payments via tokenized deposits along with familiar payment methods with no change in operations, workflows, or technology. That means a separate operation for payments via digital assets is not needed, the processor says.
“Digital assets should extend a bank’s payment capabilities, not force it to build a second payment operation,” says Craig Ramsey, a senior vice president at ACI, in a statement. “Banks need a practical way to operationalize tokenized deposits at scale using the people, controls, and processes they already trust. With ACI Connetic, payments orchestrated through Swift’s ledger can be managed alongside other payment flows within a common operational framework.”
This versatility will grow in importance as trends such as digital assets become more pronounced, ACI argues, pointing out that payment methods such as tokenized deposits are emerging from pilots and entering production.
“This [ACI-Swift collaboration] is an important development, because … there is still a lot of manual labor and custom processing involved in tokenized-deposit transfers. Adding this support is necessary for the technology to be able to scale,” notes Aaron McPherson, principal at AFM Consulting, in an email message to Digital Transactions News.
Swift in 2025 launched its blockchain ledger, which is now hosting pilots for 17 banks on six continents. The ultimate object now for ACI Connetic is to ease the way for banks to slide Swift ledger transactions into the same platforms they use for payments processing, ACI says.
For Swift, ledger transactions are real-time entries on a blockchain that banks can use to settle cross-border transactions with regulated digital assets.
In related news, SoFi Technologies Inc. and Mastercard announced SoFi Bank is the first national bank to go live with stablecoin settlement for the bank’s credit and debit card platform on Mastercard’s global network. The integration, which uses the SoFiUSD stablecoin for settlement, follows a partnership between the companies announced in March.
For its part, Utah-based SoFi Bank says it is committing the whole of its $25-billion card program to settlement via SoFiUSD. The advantage of the program for merchants is that “businesses have faster access to their money via the speed of blockchain, with the safeguards of a bank,” says Anthony Noto, SoFi’s chief executive, in a statement. SoFi is in talks with “large merchants across the U.S. regarding stablecoin settlement arrangements,” the company says.
At the same time, the venture with SoFi aids Mastercard’s strategy to support stablecoin settlement throughout its network, the card company says.
