Singapore-headquartered, digital payment and financial services firm Ant International, a subsidiary of China’s Ant Group, will participate in the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA)’s Project Ensemble sandbox, with its focus on liquidity management, one of the project’s four main themes.

The project, launched in March this year, is the HKMA’s wholesale central bank digital currency (wCBDC) project aimed at fostering the development of tokenization in Hong Kong. It enables companies to research and test tokenization use cases, including the settlement of tokenized monies and tokenized real-world assets.

Ant will leverage its Whale platform to participate in the project and develop an innovative use case with its partners. The digital firm’s platform is a next-generation treasury management solution that uses blockchain technology, advanced encryption and artificial intelligence to improve the efficiency and transparency of fund movements.

The firm will collaborate with partners Standard Chartered Bank (Hong Kong) and HSBC to develop a global liquidity management solution that allows banks to connect to and exchange their tokens via the platform. This will allow cross-border payments to be conducted around the clock in real time.

This partnership with the HKMA, Ant says, marks a significant step forward for it in fostering public-private collaboration to drive innovations in tokenization.

“As an international financial centre and the home of a vibrant financial industry,” adds Kelvin Li, the firm’s head of platform tech, “Hong Kong is a key focus area for Ant International in our journey to serve merchants around the globe.”