Australia's Payment Systems May Adapt to Tokenized Money

Australia's future account-to-account (A2A) payment systems might need to evolve to accommodate tokenized forms of money, including stablecoins and tokenized liabilities. According to Cointelegraph, a draft vision for the country's domestic payment rails highlights the potential impact of digital assets on A2A payments. The draft, co-developed by the Account-to-Account Payments Roundtable, which includes AusPayNet, Australian Payments Plus, the Reserve Bank of Australia, and the Commonwealth Treasury, identifies digital assets as one of several external forces that could influence future A2A payments. The document notes that tokenized forms of money, such as stablecoins and tokenized liabilities, are transitioning from experimentation to adoption. This shift reflects a move toward programmable, ledger-based value that could enable new settlement models, continuous availability, and more automated execution. The consultation suggests that Australia's payments planners are beginning to consider tokenized money as a design factor for mainstream payment infrastructure. The draft emphasizes that A2A systems may need to support secure interoperability between account-based money and tokenized representations of fiat currency, ensuring reliable movement of funds between these environments while maintaining trust. Digital assets are treated as a potential parallel value layer alongside other emerging forces shaping payments. The draft indicates that these technologies could reshape how payments are initiated, authorized, and managed, while introducing new risks related to accountability, liability, data use, and resilience. The A2A consultation coincides with Australia's ongoing work on tokenized money, stablecoins, and digital asset regulation. In July 2025, the RBA and the Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre announced the selected use cases for Project Acacia, a wholesale digital money project exploring settlement in tokenized asset markets. The RBA has proposed settlement assets for these use cases, including stablecoins, bank deposit tokens, a pilot wholesale central bank digital currency, and new ways of using banks' existing exchange settlement accounts at the RBA. On March 25, RBA Assistant Governor Brad Jones stated that the next phase of financial system innovation would require moving beyond short-term pilots toward longer-term, staged environments where industry and regulators can test new technologies and adjust policy settings. He highlighted the interaction of wholesale CBDC with bank deposit tokens and stablecoins, as well as the synchronization of tokenized asset ledgers with Australia's settlement infrastructure, as areas of interest. Australia is also advancing efforts to integrate parts of the digital asset sector into its financial services framework. In November, the Treasury announced proposed digital asset laws that would introduce two new financial products: digital asset platforms and tokenized custody platforms, requiring them to hold an Australian Financial Services Licence.