Greenbridge Markets has joined Centiglobe Connect as a liquidity provider. Centiglobe, headquartered in Sweden, runs a member-based cross-border payment network in which banks, payment service providers (PSPs) and electronic money institutions (EMIs) pay each other directly using bank-agnostic tokenised deposits. Greenbridge now converts between those tokens and fiat cash on demand.
The Fintech Times put questions to Petter Sandgren, CEO of Centiglobe, and Svante Hedin, CEO of Greenbridge Markets, about how the model works, where the risk sits and what it means for the capital PSPs tie up in pre-funding.
Bank money, not a digital asset
Sandgren described the flow as similar to a stablecoin payment. Money is collected in local currency, converted into tokens, moved between two digital wallets and converted back for payout through the local payment system. The difference lies in what the token is.
“A tokenised deposit is essentially a digital version of money held in a bank account,” he said. “The token itself does not have a value of its own, it represents the holder’s claim on the underlying bank deposit. This means it is treated as bank money rather than as a digital asset, which can make the legal and regulatory setup simpler across different countries.”
The token is bank-agnostic because, although the deposit sits at one bank, it can be used outside that bank’s own network, so two PSPs with no direct relationship with the issuing bank can still use it to settle. Because tokenised deposits are bank money, PSPs can also keep them on their balance sheets and offset payments against each other rather than repeatedly converting in and out of tokens.
Greenbridge sits at both ends of that process. “Without this service, each member would need to maintain their own bank account for the tokenisation and normally place funds in advance, even if they only need them later,” Sandgren said. “Instead, members can simply buy or sell tokens with Greenbridge when they need them.”
The pre-funding problem
Most PSPs today pre-fund their payout partners, typically holding enough liquidity to cover around two to five days of expected payment volumes with each one, according to Sandgren. The problem compounds across markets. “Liquidity held in one market cannot easily be used to fund payments in another,” he said. “A PSP can therefore have excess cash in one country while not having enough available in another.”
Top-ups sent over SWIFT can take two to three days to settle, and in many markets PSPs cannot use client funds to meet pre-funding requirements, so they fund those balances with their own capital. Backing the tokens with a pledged cash account at a global bank, Sandgren argued, lets liquidity be held centrally, netted across countries and replenished with same-day value.
“Overall, this approach could potentially reduce prefunding needs by as much as 80 to 90 per cent saving large sums in capital costs,” he said. “The main benefit comes from keeping liquidity in one central place while making it faster and easier to use across markets.”
Asked why some members cannot hold tokenised deposits themselves, Sandgren pointed to the cost of building the capability. Accepting, holding and managing tokens “requires investments in technology, systems, accounting and legal expertise,” he said. For many PSPs the practical route is to buy tokens when a payment starts and convert them back before payout, so that “they can access tokenised payments faster, with lower upfront investment and less operational complexity.”
Standing between two forms of money
Hedin describes Greenbridge as “an exchange desk between two forms of the same money: cash held in a regular bank account and its tokenised equivalent.” The risk of one side paying while the other fails to deliver is handled by Centiglobe as settlement partner, which holds the tokens and releases them only once the cash side of the transaction has been verified.
“For us, the remaining risks are much closer to those you would find in traditional banking,” Hedin said. “We rely on the bank behind the token to honour its obligations, payment systems can have outages or cut-off times, and we need to make sure the right amount of liquidity is in the right place at the right time.” Greenbridge plans for the busiest day it could realistically face rather than around an average day, he added.
On a stressed market, when every member wants to convert the same way, he was direct. “If everyone suddenly wants to move money in the same direction, we may need to say no to a trade,” he said. “Fortunately, we have never had to do so, and it is something we want to avoid because it limits how useful we can be to the market.”
Because the tokens are backed by deposits with global banks and Centiglobe’s delivery-versus-payment setup removes settlement risk, Hedin said the main cost is funding the transactions efficiently. “This allows us to keep the cost of converting tokens back into fiat generally lower than traditional stablecoin off-ramping.”
Sandgren described the same mechanism from the network side. Tokens due to be exchanged for cash can be locked until the corresponding cash has been received, then released, linking the two legs of the transfer. “As a result, participants can complete the transaction without taking direct settlement risk when working with Greenbridge,” he said.
Regulation and growth
Centiglobe positions itself as technical infrastructure for a closed network of regulated financial institutions. Each member remains licensed and supervised in its own jurisdiction and responsible for AML, customers and customer funds. “Centiglobe connects the institutions technically but never takes possession of funds,” Sandgren said. The tokenised deposits originate with a member and circulate only among approved institutions.
On the stablecoin rules now arriving, he noted that the EU’s Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA) excludes tokenised deposits that legally qualify as deposits, leaving them under banking regulation, and that the UK’s cryptoasset regime similarly distinguishes tokenised deposits from stablecoins.
The network currently has 27 members, predominantly PSPs alongside a select number of banks, up from five during 2025 and 2026. Centiglobe expects to reach approximately 50 members over the next 12 months.
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